


parallel

by oisugasuga



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Coffee Shops & Cafés, Angst, Beaches, Blood and Gore, Coffee Shops, Diners, Drinking, Eventual Smut, Friends With Benefits, M/M, Multiple Dimensions, Murder Mystery, Mutual Pining, Mystery, Oikawa is a Ghost Hunter and Suga is a Digital Artist, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Pining, San Francisco, Science Fiction, Slow Burn, Supernatural Elements, Tattoos
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-05-01
Updated: 2019-02-22
Packaged: 2019-04-30 13:12:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 35,408
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14497719
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oisugasuga/pseuds/oisugasuga
Summary: Looking back up at Oikawa, Suga flashes him the brightest smile he can. He locks all of the stress, all of the want and yearning, all of the jealousy away, imagines that he’s chucking the key down the 16th Avenue Tiled Steps, watching it clang and bounce down the bright, mosaic tiles until it glints one last time and he loses sight of it."I’m fine," he reassures him.Suga doesn’t look back at the rose-colored door the rest of the time they’re there.





	1. throw away the key

**Author's Note:**

> Please read my one-shot ["Heikō"](https://www.archiveofourown.org/works/14459310) before beginning this fic because this world is based off of the one seen briefly in that story.

"Umm, Koushi?"  
  
    Suga pauses where he’s tapping his nails against the counter he’s leaned against, cranes his neck to peer around the corner at the sound of his name.  
  
    Oikawa is back at their table already, where they’d left their stuff and their coffees to come grab extra sugar and cream. He’s holding his backpack up, a frown etched over his face.  
  
    "I’ll be right back," Suga tells Alisa — the barista for today — and then he pushes off of the counter, avoids tripping over a few pots of electric-blue foothill penstemon that are crowded on the floor nearby.  
  
    "Are you okay?" he asks as soon as Oikawa is within hearing distance. "What happened?"  
  
    "Someone went through my stuff," Oikawa says, rummaging through his hot pink book bag, pulling out a few crumpled sheets of paper and tossing them on the table, followed closely by a pack of cinnamon gum. "But nothing’s missing."  
  
    Suga automatically looks for his phone. He had left it back here with everything else, out on the table in plain sight.  
  
    "My phone’s gone," he says as soon as he sees that it’s not where he left it, his heart skipping a beat. He has everything on that phone — all of his friend’s numbers, all of the photos he likes to snap of Oikawa whenever they’re together, his to-do list.  
  
    Oikawa’s head snaps up, brown eyes flickering to the table and then around the area.  
  
    He makes a soft noise and then bends down. Suga’s phone is between his fingers when he straightens back up.  
  
    "It was on the floor," he says, voice understandably bewildered. Suga grabs the device gratefully, peeks at the screen.  
  
     _"Koushi, could you grab a pack of eggs on the way home? We’re out and Mom’s making tamagoyaki for tomorrow."_  
  
    Just a message from Kumiko and a couple notifications from his latest tweet.  
  
    "How did it get there?" Suga asks out loud. He’s just as confused as Oikawa is. "If anyone had come back this way we would’ve seen them, Tooru," he points out a second later.  
  
    The corner they always sit in is on the far side of their favorite coffeeshop in San Fransisco, Parallels. The only way anyone could get to it would be to round the front counter and walk down the short, narrow hall leading back here. They would’ve had to have passed right by Suga and Oikawa and Suga hasn’t seen anyone else in here besides a girl reading a book up front.  
  
    Oikawa’s frown deepens. He sets his backpack down but doesn’t answer.  
  
    Suga looks around the small space, eyes traveling over the familiar, coffee-stained table, pausing briefly on the carving of their initials that Oikawa had done months ago as a joke.  
  
  _SK_ ♡ _OT_  
  
    He looks away, ignores the pathetic thump his heart gives, the heated crawl of a flush over his skin.  
  
    His eyes keep moving — over the glass windowpanes that look out over the park that Parallels is nestled into, over the familiar bookshelves and worn book bindings, over the viridescent plants that line and perch on every available surface.  
  
    And then Suga’s eyes drop down to the floor and meet emerald, glowing ones. He startles a little internally before he realizes it’s just Calypso, the coffee shop tabby who somehow blends in perfectly with the rug she’s sprawled on.  
  
    "Maybe Caly knocked my phone off the table?" Suga says out loud, looking back up to Oikawa, who’s back to rummaging through his things.  
  
    "But she can’t unzip backpacks," Oikawa points out. Suga pauses.  
  
    "Are you sure your stuff was gone through?" he asks, beginning to feel less and less worried that someone had somehow gotten back here and tampered with their stuff by the minute. He slides into the table, taps at his phone screen mindlessly. "Are you sure you didn’t just unzip it before we went up to order?"  
  
    "I’m sure," Oikawa answers, finally putting his bag down. He frowns a moment later, sits down opposite Suga.  
  
    "Or at least," he mutters, looking more and more confused, "I think I am."  
  
    Suga bites back a laugh.  
  
    Oikawa looks so cute. He’s wearing his glasses today — the big, black-framed, nerd ones that are Suga’s favorite — and a yellow t-shirt that Suga’s pretty sure he’s owned since they first met each other. His nose scrunches up the way it always does when he’s thinking hard about something.  
  
    Suga sits and waits and knows what’s coming next before Oikawa even opens his mouth.  
  
    "It was probably a spirit from the other side." Oikawa’s voice is matter-of-fact. He readjusts his glasses on his nose with long, graceful fingers.  
  
    Suga resists the urge to tell his friend just how nerdy he actually looks right now and instead stifles a grin behind a hand.  
  
    He also resists the crazy urge that courses through him to lean across the table, pluck Oikawa’s glasses off his face, and kiss him.  
  
   _"Pull it together, Sugawara,"_ he thinks. He can’t do this today.  
  
    And even if Suga weren’t completely terrified of ruining their friendship, Oikawa’s off-limits anyway.  
  
    He’s more interested in that boy he had met at that night club him and Suga had snuck into a couple of months ago. Suga’s had more than enough practice watching Oikawa shove his tongue down Daishō’s throat to know that.  
  
     _"At least Tooru is pan,"_ his brain supplies unhelpfully. _"And not straight. Then you’d have no chance at all."_  
  
    "One shot in the dark with extra whip." The voice by Suga’s elbow startles him from his thoughts.  
  
    He looks up, regains control of his pulse quickly.  
  
    Alisa stands there in her artfully-ripped jeans and white, poplin blouse, holding a mug of steaming coffee and espresso out to Suga.  
  
    "Thanks," Suga says, gratefully accepting the warm drink. He needs all the espresso he can get to clear his head.  
  
    "Another cup?" Oikawa asks in disbelief, giving Alisa a friendly wave while managing to raise an eyebrow at Suga and grab a notebook from his backpack at the same time.  
  
    "I didn’t sleep well last night," Suga protests, holding his second coffee to him protectively. "I need an espresso drip right now."  
  
    "Anything else I can get you while I’m back here?" Alisa asks Suga, tucking a lock of silvery-white hair back behind an ear. An earring shaped like a cat and a heavy industrial twinkle as she does so, the faint edge of a tattoo showing at her neck under her hair. It’s a cat — a Petersburg Sphynx — Suga knows, with gleaming gold eyes done in gilt ink.  
  
    Her brother, Lev, has the exact same one in the exact same spot, just on the opposite side of his neck. He must be off today because Suga hasn’t seem him anywhere since they walked in.  
  
    "No, I think we’re okay," Suga responds, smiling up at his sister’s girlfriend. Alisa nods and smiles back before leaving.  
  
    "How are her and Kumiko doing?" Oikawa asks without looking up, pulling out a pen and uncapping it with his teeth.  
  
    Suga opens his mouth to respond but his phone buzzes before he can speak. He looks down.  
  
     _"Could you also grab me some more herbal tea while you’re out? And some chocolate? :)"_  
  
    Suga sighs and flips his phone over. Oikawa looks up.  
  
    "Kumiko?" he guesses.  
  
    "If I tell her I’m out," Suga complains, "she ends up sending me an errands list the length of the Golden Gate Bridge."  
  
    As soon as the words are out of his mouth, Suga’s phone buzzes twice more as if to prove his point.  
  
    "Nice comparison there, nerd," Oikawa teases. Suga sticks his tongue out at him.  
  
    "And we have our final research papers due next week," Suga groans. "I don’t have time to grab tea and chocolate and -"  
  
    He pauses to turn his phone back over and peek at it.  
  
    "- face masks and ice-cream," he finishes incredulously.  
  
    Oikawa whistles. "Did her and Alisa break up or something? That sounds like a major heartbreak kit."  
  
    Suga snorts. "Those are just Kumiko’s nighttime necessities."  
  
    He lets his forehead thump to the table, suddenly overwhelmed by everything he still has to do today.  
  
    Oikawa laughs and then there are soft, soft fingers in Suga’s hair.  
  
    "You’ll get the paper done, Kou," Oikawa says, fingers moving slow and gentle, tucking strands of Suga’s hair back behind an ear. His touch sends those odd, shivery urges over Suga’s skin — those urges that Suga tries so desperately to forget about, that make his skin go hot and his stomach dip low, that he’s been having for the past three months.  
  
    Suga barely stops himself from pulling away.  
  
   _"Relax,"_ he tells himself, squeezing his eyes shut.  
  
    Oikawa’s fingertips are warm whenever they brush the shell of Suga’s ear. He continues to push Suga’s hair back in long, languid strokes, waiting silently for Suga to say something.  
  
    "Koushiii," Oikawa sing-songs when seconds tick by and Suga doesn’t speak. "Baby, look up."  
  
    Suga flinches, something sharp stabbing him in the chest and stealing his breath away.  
  
    He automatically sits up right after in the hope that it’ll cover up his obvious and strange reaction to the pet name, Oikawa’s hand falling from his head.  
  
     _"Oh my God, Koushi,"_ he thinks angrily. _"Calm down. You know Tooru calls you that sometimes, you know he’s always been touchy. Stop being so on edge. Stop being so obvious."_  
  
    He chances a look at Oikawa.  
  
    Oikawa doesn’t look confused or worried and Suga thanks his lucky stars.  
  
    "There he is," the other says instead, a victorious grin flashing over his face.  
  
    Suga musters a smile that he hopes looks genuine. Calypso watches him from the rug with pitying eyes.  
  
    "We should probably get started," he tells Oikawa, pulling his own backpack up into the seat next to him from under the table. "I’m going to have to run to the corner store before I go home tonight. And I still have to submit my application for Berkeley tonight too."  
  
    "And we have 8 a.m. Calculus tomorrow," Oikawa adds.  
  
    "Why do you look excited about that?" Suga asks, laughing a little although he’s not grateful at all for the reminder. He’ll be stuck waiting for the subway at Forest Hill at 7:20 a.m. to make it to SF State on time for lecture.  
  
    It’s ghostly out there that early, the old white and black checkered walls echoing footsteps and distant shrieks of metal on metal, the dim lighting turning Suga’s skin a horrible sickly shade. It’s like a murder scene in one of Oikawa’s beloved horror films.  
  
    "Because, Sugawara," Oikawa says mock-seriously, "math is a gift."  
  
    "Dork," Suga fake-coughs into his palm.  
  
    Oikawa kicks him lightly under the table and they grin at each other before turning to their respective essays. Suga blames the flip of his heart on the caffeine.  
  
    As silence descends on the corner, Suga pauses for a moment, props his chin on a hand and stares out the windows that make up the entire coffeeshop, walls and ceiling. It’s what he loves most about this place, that it’s so translucent, so open, no secrets. It’s surrounded by Golden Gate Park, in the heart of its beautiful trails and gardens and ponds. It’s quiet out here, away from the hustle and bustle of the city in a way.  
  
    Usually Suga comes here when he needs some space. He comes here to destress, to clear his head, comes with Oikawa to vent about classes and professors and how his latest piece isn’t turning out right.  
  
    But most importantly this is Suga and Oikawa’s place.  
  
    They had met freshman year at San Francisco State, Suga having lived in the city his entire life and Oikawa having moved from a small town outside Los Angeles. Being paired together as partners for a class assignment had led to an unbreakable and fast friendship.  
  
    And it had been here, in Parallels, that they had first come to spend time together outside of meeting up to finish classwork. It’s here that they’ve been coming ever since — for coffee runs at five in the morning after a night out, for drowsy afternoons spent leaning against each other and just talking, for last-minute cram sessions.  
  
    Suga eyes Oikawa out of his peripheral vision, thinks back on the two years that have flown by so quickly, their second summer having known each other approaching fast.  
  
    Oikawa had gone home last year, had been gone the entire break. Suga doesn’t like to think about how much he had missed him. Especially not now when -  
  
    But both of them are going to be here this time. Oikawa’s already accepted an internship studying folklore and mythology at the University of San Francisco and Suga is applying to a digital art summer program with Berkeley.  
  
    Suga is torn between being completely happy and a complete nervous wreck.  
  
    He turns back to his laptop, focuses on the blank page with the blinking cursor, tries to wrack his brain on how he wants to start this paper instead of on thoughts of having to deal with Oikawa splitting his time between him and Daishō since Oikawa’s on-again, off-again boyfriend is _also_ originally from San Francisco and will _also_ be here the whole summer.  
  
    Calypso meows from the floor, jumps to perch in Suga’s lap.  
  
    And it’s then that Suga first feels it.  
  
    It’s not the ache in his chest that he gets whenever Oikawa throws an affectionate arm around his shoulders and kisses his cheek when he’s tipsy, sugar-sweet breath washing over Suga’s face. It’s not the exhaustion that’s sitting on his shoulders and pounding against the inside of his skull, or the rush of caffeine that’s coursing like poison through his blood.  
  
    Suga stops, completely freezes, eyes flickering up over the top of his laptop, past Oikawa’s head, finally landing on the rose-colored door that sits at the end of this side of the coffeeshop.  
  
    It’s the staff break room. There’s a sign that says so to the right, taped up to the wall with a flower-shaped sticker.  
  
    Suga’s seen it a million times before. He’s watched Alisa and Lev and Kuroo and Kenma walk through it on countless days and nights.  
  
    But right now -  
  
     _"Something’s different, something’s changed."_ Suga’s thoughts are staticky, halfway there like he’s trying to argue with himself, rationalize the illogical with the logical, trying to tell himself to look away when all he wants to do is look closer.  
  
    The rose paint on the door seems fainter the harder Suga looks, seems unreachable somehow, as if it’s vanishing into the air only to appear again, halfway here and halfway there.  
  
    Suga blinks, tries to shake the uneasiness that’s washed over him from nowhere, tries to ignore the way the hairs on the back of his neck have stood straight up, the way his fingertips have turned to ice, numb and cold even though today is muggy and sweltering.  
  
    He’s finally lost it. The stress of upcoming finals and his feelings for Oikawa only growing stronger the more he tries to shove them away has finally cracked him. He needs to -  
  
    "Kou?"  
  
    Suga startles so hard he almost knocks over one of his mugs.  
  
    His eyes flash over to Oikawa. His friend is staring at him with concern shining dark and heavy in his eyes. His long eyelashes throw shadows of ink against his cheeks.  
  
    "Are you okay?" Oikawa asks, setting down his pen, a few paragraphs already scrawled across his notebook paper.  
  
    Suga glances back over to the door.  
  
    The feeling is gone. Whatever Suga had _thought_ he’d seen there has disappeared, melting into thin air like the sparks of the bonfires on Ocean Beach do at night, glittering in the night sky briefly before they vanish.  
  
    He eyes his second coffee before he pushes it away.  
  
    Looking back up at Oikawa, Suga flashes him the brightest smile he can. He locks all of the stress, all of the want and yearning, all of the jealousy away, imagines that he’s chucking the key down the 16th Avenue Tiled Steps, watching it clang and bounce down the bright, mosaic tiles until it glints one last time and he loses sight of it.  
  
    "I’m fine," he reassures him.  
  
    Suga doesn’t look back at the rose-colored door the rest of the time they’re there.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *sweats nervously* first chapter of my new long-fic doneeeeee
> 
> don't be afraid to leave kudos/comments, but esp comments bc I love hearing from you all
> 
> and for more OiSuga content, my blog is --> [here](oisugasuga.tumblr.com)


	2. crazy love

"One more of whatever this was, please."  
  
    Suga slides the miniature shot glass back over the sticky counter, laughs a little at himself even though there’s a trace of bitterness to his amusement. He’s always polite, always nice and smiling and using words like "please" even when he’s halfway to being drunk and all the of way to feeling shitty and miserable.  
  
    The bartender doesn’t say anything, just pours another shot of whatever Suga had had last, accepts the cash and tip Suga leaves in return.  
  
    Music pounds through the floor, through the walls, up through the bottoms of Suga’s sneakers and into his chest as he turns around, presses his back to the edge of the bar and surveys the scene in front of him.  
  
    He should’ve just stayed home. Finals had been taken, term papers had been turned in, and Suga had been looking forward to his first weekend of the summer being spent curled up in his bed with Netflix and some oolong tea — until Oikawa had shown up wielding a pair of his tight jeans and a nice shirt with the back cut out for Suga to wear, pleading with him to come out and have a good time, come with him to celebrate the end of the school year.  
  
    People crowd the dance floor of the bar he’s in — he can’t remember the name, just remembers seeing a neon pink sign outside and smelling saltwater, so they must be close to the ocean.  
  
    Lights and wisps and curls of fog mix together to create a hazy, dizzying effect, the dancers alternating between being thrown into darkness and then illuminated, offering flashes of lipstick-smiles and hands on hips and sweating drinks clutched in loose fingers.  
  
    But that doesn’t mean that Suga can’t see Oikawa clearly.  
  
    Oikawa isn’t dancing. He stands out clear as day over in that corner with the blue, velvet couches.  
  
    Oikawa and Daishō are lost in each other, wrapped up in their own little world. Daishō sits in Oikawa’s lap as if he’s always been there, his hands in Oikawa’s hair as they kiss each other. From here Suga has a perfect view as Oikawa’s fingertips edge up under the hem of Daishō’s loose tee, baring smooth skin.  
  
    Suga looks away. He throws back his shot, relishes in the burn as the alcohol slides easily down his throat.  
  
    It helps dull the sharp ache in the center of his chest, the feeling of being punched in the stomach he gets whenever he sees them together.  
  
     _"Why did I come?"_ he thinks not for the first time.  
  
    But Suga knows why.  
  
    He’s hell-bent and determined to move on.  
  
    Oikawa is happy. Sure, there have been a few rough patches with Daishō in the past few months, but what relationship doesn’t have its problems?  
  
    What matters is that Oikawa is happy and that Suga is still his best friend. And Suga is determined to keep it that way.  
  
    Oikawa is too important to him for him to fuck everything up with unrequited feelings.  
  
    "Penny for your thoughts?"  
  
    The alcohol dulling Suga’s senses dampens the shock at the sound of the voice right by his left ear.  
  
    But he can’t hide the surprise on his face when he turns towards it and sees none other than Kuroo Tetsurō standing in front of him.  
  
    Kuroo laughs.  
  
    "Koushi, right?" he asks, leaning a hip against a nearby barstool.  
  
    Suga nods, eyes taking in Kuroo’s dark-washed jeans and buttoned-up shirt quickly. It’s odd to see him like this and not in the standard black apron from Parallels, or in one of his vintage t-shirts with bad puns stamped across the front of them.  
  
    "And you’re Tetsurō?" Suga ventures even though he already knows the answer. He’s seen Kuroo’s name-tag more times than he can count over the past four semesters.  
  
    Kuroo, however, looks briefly taken aback and then pleased that Suga’s recognized him.  
  
    "The one and only," he answers, flashing a cat-like grin.  
  
    "I’ve never seen you outside of work," Suga giggles, suddenly finding that funnier than he probably should. The alcohol is beginning to take more effect and everything seems just a bit softer, the hot, neon lights of the club smudged into watercolors. Pleasant heat unfurls in Suga’s chest.  
  
    "I go out occasionally," Kuroo says, smiling a little at Suga’s words. "My sister bartends here every other weekend so I get free drinks sometimes."  
  
    Suga nods and then stops.  
  
    "Wait," he says, hesitating and thinking about how to phrase the sudden question that’s floating through his hazy thoughts. "So is this not your -"  
  
    He trails off awkwardly, gesturing around the club, thinking about who this particular bar caters to and wondering if Kuroo only stops by for free alcohol.  
  
    Suga’s not sure why he’s asking anyway. They’re just talking.  
  
    Kuroo looks confused for a split second before understanding dawns on his handsome face.  
  
    "Oh," he says. "I’m bi. I come here for more than just my sister’s horrible drink-mixing skills."  
  
    They both laugh at that, although Suga’s is a little embarrassed.  
  
    He feels like an idiot. Out of habit his eyes wander to look for Oikawa, but he and Daishō are no longer on the couch.  
  
    "Besides," Kuroo adds, "I wouldn’t have stayed to talk to you if I wasn’t interested." His tone is honest and amused.  
  
     _"Oh,"_ Suga thinks, flushing at the admission.  
  
    He goes to take a sip of from the glass in his hand to hide his surprise before he remembers that it’s empty, that he’s still gripping the shot glass between tight fingers.  
  
    Kuroo laughs again — probably at Suga’s expression and red face. He has a nice laugh — loud and genuine — and Suga finds himself smiling for the first time that night.  
  
    "Do you want to dance?" Kuroo asks, holding out a hand. The tips of his dark hair get lit up in gold and pink and blue as he stands there, waiting.  
  
    Suga hesitates only a second longer, his eyes flickering over the club once more as if he’s expecting to see something there that’ll stop him from saying yes.  
  
    And then he sets his shot glass down on the bar, reaches forward and fits his hand into Kuroo’s warm, firm grip.  
  
     _"Why not?"_ his brain asks, liquor rushing through his veins like wildfire. _"Kuroo’s hot and nice and obviously interested in you. Besides, aren’t you here to move on?"_  
  
    Kuroo flashes Suga a blinding smile and then tugs him into the crowd, into the push and pull of the dancers.  
  
    Suga feels as if he’s been dragged underwater into a technicolor, hazy ocean for a moment, smoke curling and twisting through the air, bright gleams of grins in the dark like the spark of sun on water, colors everywhere — dark red manicured nails, inked up sneakers, glimmerings of silver and gold body piercings.  
  
    Kuroo pulls them to an empty space in the writhing, grinding crowd, places firm hands on Suga’s hips, pulls him closer when Suga doesn’t protest.  
  
    The music is intoxicating and Suga isn’t completely drunk but he’s more than tipsy and Kuroo smells nice, like spice and vanilla.  
  
    Suga steps closer, lets Kuroo rock them side to side for a few minutes, neither of them able to do much but smile at each other over the loud bass.   
  
    Suga is okay with not talking right now. He just wants to keep riding this high, this buzz of vodka rushing through his head and Kuroo’s attention sending shivers of anticipation down his spine.  
  
    When he glances down a cat tattoo flashes up at him from Kuroo’s right wrist, smaller than Alisa’s and different looking, a different breed. A tattoo that Suga’s never seen before.  
  
     _"Huh,"_ Suga thinks dazedly. _"That’s interesting."_  
  
    The drinks Suga’s had leave him light-headed, warm, his troubles vanishing for now so that he finds himself openly laughing when Kuroo spins him suddenly and brings him back in until Suga’s spine is pressed to Kuroo’s chest. He can feel the other’s warmth bleeding into his bare skin, thinks he almost catches the sound of a hitched breath when Kuroo gets a glimpse of just how much skin Suga is showing.  
  
    Kuroo is solid against him and Suga likes this position. He leans his head back against Kuroo’s shoulder and closes his eyes, enjoys the feeling of Kuroo’s hands at his waist, of his fingers edging up under the hem of Suga’s shirt to stroke against the sensitive skin of his stomach with gentle, slow touches.  
  
    He likes it even more when Kuroo nuzzles into the side of his neck, lips whispering over his jawline before they drop to press a sweet, slow kiss to his bare shoulder blade.  
  
    Suga flashes hot all at once, skin prickling with heat. On a whim, he pauses in the swaying they’re still doing to grind his hips back lightly.  
  
    Kuroo’s fingers tighten, tug Suga closer, his mouth moving hot against Suga’s neck.  
  
     _"God,"_ Suga thinks, heat settling pleasantly in the pit of his stomach. It’s been so long since he’s been kissed, been touched, so long since he’s thought of anyone else but Oikawa -  
  
    The reminder has Suga’s eyes opening, the warmth of Kuroo fading a little when he remembers why he had been so down in the first place.  
  
    But in the next second it’s forgotten again, washed away by the music and the rush and Kuroo rolling his hips forward against Suga.  
  
    Suga moans, tilts his head to bare his neck more. He sighs when he’s rewarded with a soft bite. His heart thuds in his ears.  
  
    He turns around. For some reason he’s on edge. He wants something more to fill the itch in his chest. He needs something more and Kuroo is only looking at him, eyes dark and shining in the gloom.  
  
    Suga wraps a hand around the back of Kuroo’s neck, skin burning.  
  
    Kuroo meets him easily, lips on his, fingers in Suga’s hair as they tangle back together, no longer dancing.  
  
    Suga has to stand on tip-toe to reach Kuroo fully, gasps when his hot palms splay out over Suga’s bare back, dip down to pull at his hips as he works Suga’s mouth open.  
  
     _"So nice, so, so nice,"_ is really all Suga can think. He pushes up, pushes more insistently, meets Kuroo’s kisses with fervent ones of his own.  
  
    He doesn’t want to feel anything else but this.  
  
    "Come here," Kuroo breaks away to gasp, grabbing Suga’s hand and pulling him away from the crush of people. Before he knows it Suga realizes they’re over by the same cerulean velvet couches that Oikawa and Daishō had been occupying earlier.  
  
    Kuroo sits, tugs until Suga is in his lap, until Suga can count the number of pale white scars that cover Kuroo’s throat that he hadn’t noticed until now, until he can see the flecks of gold in Kuroo’s eyes, lit up and outlined in neon lights.  
  
    "Is this okay?" Kuroo asks breathlessly, running his palms up and down Suga’s sides, fingers skimming over the cut-out back in his shirt. His hair is mussed, lips pink. His thighs are strong under Suga, his fingertips sending sparks up and down Suga’s spine.  
  
    He’s gorgeous, a dark shadow in the brightness of the party lights, sucking Suga in.  
  
    "Yes," Suga answers quickly. He’s hot, burning up, aches for physical contact. And Kuroo is all his.  
  
    When Kuroo kisses him again Suga can’t help the small whimper that keens up his throat. It’s messy, hurried, different from the slow, easy kisses on the dance floor.  
  
    He grips at Kuroo’s shoulders, rolls his hips down insistently, shivers at Kuroo’s answering bite to his lower lip, the shudder that rocks through him.  
  
    Time has stopped holding meaning. Minutes pass, or hours. All Suga knows is the praise that Kuroo is suddenly whispering in his ear, the firm grip he has on Suga’s ass to pull him closer and adjust him so that Suga can rock down against one thigh easier.  
  
    Suga would be embarrassed at how hard he is right now, but between the alcohol and Kuroo’s hands on his skin and his tongue covering every inch of the inside of Suga’s mouth, he can’t bring himself to care.  
  
    Kuroo tastes like some kind of fruit with the bitterness of alcohol on his lips, he keeps calling Suga "beautiful", and the only thing that matters is when they’re going to leave, when Kuroo is going to ask Suga to come to his place.  
  
    Everything else — his exhaustion from not sleeping much between exams, the strange, unshakable feeling he had gotten all those weeks ago at Parallels, Daishō’s slow but steady intrusion into Oikawa and Suga’s time together — all of it is forgotten in the heat building in the pit of Suga’s stomach, in the slick slide of Kuroo’s mouth over his skin, in the wonderful, perfect pressure of Kuroo’s thigh between his legs.  
  
    "God," Kuroo murmurs, pulling away for a moment. His eyes are half-lidded, dark and hungry. He brushes a stray strand of Suga’s hair from his face. "Do you want to -"  
  
    But before he can finish his sentence, his gaze is caught by something over Suga’s shoulder. His fingertips pause against Suga’s cheek.  
  
    Suga frowns as the moment stretches on, comes down a little from the high he’s on. He twists around, sudden curiosity and wariness warring in his chest at Kuroo’s expression.  
  
    Daishō stands there.  
  
    His arms are crossed over his chest, a smirk on his lips. His green eyes flash wickedly.  
  
    "Well this is interesting," he says. Kuroo is as tense as a taught wire against Suga.  
  
    Suga’s whole mood flips.  
  
    It’s obvious that Kuroo knows Daishō. And the devil just had to appear, right when things had been starting to feel better.  
  
    Oikawa materializes from the crowd a half-second later, two drinks in his hands. His mouth is open to say something, but as soon as he sees Kuroo and Suga, he stops, his gaze sweeping over the two of them.  
  
    For some reason, as he meets Oikawa’s confused eyes, Suga feels sick.  
  
    He crawls off of Kuroo, stands up and wobbles a little bit on weak knees. His head is beginning to pound, his throat is as dry as sandpaper.  
  
    Oikawa won’t stop looking at him. His face is unreadable in the shadows.  
  
    "What’s all this?" Oikawa asks, voice just unconcerned and lazy enough to appear as if he’s not really interested in the answer. But Suga knows him better than that.   
  
    "Just saw an old friend with a new one," Daishō answers, still smiling, his teeth flashing.  
  
    "Suguru," Kuroo greets coolly, standing up as well. "Long time, no see."  
  
    "That’s not necessarily a bad thing, now is it?" Daishō coos, taking one of the drinks from Oikawa and winding his free arm around Oikawa’s waist.  
  
    Suga looks away, gets the insane urge to grab Kuroo’s hand in some form of sick retaliation. But Kuroo doesn’t deserve that.   
  
    Besides, Kuroo isn’t really focused on him anymore.  
  
    "How’s Mika?" Kuroo asks instead of answering the question, eyes glittering with malice, tracking the stroke of Daishō hand against Oikawa’s hip.  
  
    Oikawa’s eyes keep flittering from Kuroo to Suga, lingering uncomfortably long on Suga’s face, but Suga refuses to look at him.  
  
    The music is suddenly too loud. It sends sharp bursts of an ache through Suga’s skull.  
  
    Anger at himself and at Oikawa’s unrelenting stare is beginning to spark in Suga’s chest in bright, bright colors that slice through the haziness of vodka and cranberry and Kuroo’s touches. It feels like that one time that he had been stung by a jellyfish out swimming at Seal Cove as a child — searing hot and painful.  
  
    Why should Suga feel ashamed? Or apologetic? Or as if he owes Oikawa an explanation?  
  
    Oikawa isn’t his. And he’s not Oikawa’s.  
  
    At Kuroo’s question, Daishō stiffens, a range of emotions flashing over his face in time with the beat of the strobe lights. Surprise, resentment, fear. Heartbreak.  
  
    Suga catches Oikawa register the reaction, his brows furrowing as he finally stops looking over at Suga to look sideways at his boyfriend.  
  
    Kuroo catches it too.  
  
    "Oh, you haven’t told _him_ yet, have you?" he purrs. He looks like a cat ready to pounce, his target clearly in sight.  
  
    "Shut up, Tetsurō," Daishō grits out, letting go of Oikawa. "That’s none of your business."  
  
    "Mm, but a little birdie told me that she’s been looking for you," Kuroo pushes. "That she has something she wants to tell you in person."  
  
    This time only shock registers over Daishō’s face — and something else Suga can’t quite put his finger on.  
  
    But he doesn’t care about it. He doesn’t care about any of this.  
  
    He doesn’t know who Mika is or what she wants to tell Daishō, he doesn’t know what Oikawa is thinking, he doesn’t know if Kuroo even remembers he’s standing there.  
  
    Suga is suddenly cold and tired and all he wants is something to dull the pounding of his head. And he wants to get away.  
  
    So he leaves.  
  
    He pushes past Oikawa and Daishō, winding past dancers and couples tangled up in each other, nearly tripping over his own feet.  
  
    Suga thinks he hears someone call out his name, but whoever it is — Oikawa, Kuroo, Daishō — he’s not sure and he doesn’t care.  
  
    He just keeps going.  
  
    As soon as cool, fresh, saltwater air hits his face, Suga feels better. It clears his head more. He recognizes where he is again.  
  
    The pounding bass and blinding neon glow disappear as the bar doors swing shut behind him with a satisfying thunk.  
  
    He’s suddenly glad that he had decided to wear a pair of old Converse to go clubbing. His house is close enough that if Suga decides to walk instead of taking public transportation he can be back in about twenty minutes — the last thing he wants is to get fined for throwing up on the subway.  
  
    He begins to move, the flickering streetlights outside throwing alternating patches of light and shadow across the empty road, a chilly breeze blowing off of the ocean and ruffling Suga’s bangs. A gorgeous cluster of crazy love dahlia’s bloom along the side of the street, their ivory petals glowing in the dark, the blush-tipped edges soft and beautiful.  
  
    Suga almost feels bad for just leaving Kuroo, but, now that he’s out here in the summer air and not stuck in the smoky, overwhelming haze of the club, Suga realizes that all it would’ve been would’ve been a one-night stand.  
  
    Not that he would have complained much about a good night with Kuroo in bed, but -  
  
    It’s undeniable that Suga hadn’t been able to shake thoughts of Oikawa the entire time, no matter how hard he had tried. Oikawa had carved himself a place in Suga’s life from day one and Suga’s afraid that it’s going to take more than another pretty face to fill that space now.  
  
    Biting his lip, unshed, frustrated tears burning at his eyes, Suga wraps his arms around his waist, shivering because he had forgotten his jacket at the bar and there’s no way he’s going back now, no matter how cold his back is.  
  
     _"This sucks,"_ he thinks, so tired now that his eyes blur.  
  
    A sudden stronger rush of wind billows down the street. Suga stops, surprised at the force, taken aback when the streetlights begin to flicker more rapidly, blinking on and off.  
  
    All other thoughts leave his head, his bitterness disappearing as bewilderment takes its place.  
  
     _"What the fuck?"_ he thinks, staring up, frozen. The bulbs hiss and sputter, darkness splashing over Suga and then light.  
  
    They had been fine earlier, flickering on as Suga and Oikawa had arrived at the club together, the sun sinking below the horizon in the distance as the city bled into nightlife.  
  
    But now -  
  
    The skin at the back of Suga’s neck prickles, goosebumps rising on his bare arms.  
  
     _"There has to be a storm coming,"_ Suga tries to rationalize, starting to feel oddly afraid. But the sky is clear, not a cloud in them, the moon heavy and full.  
  
    The lights keep going off and on, off and on, off and on.  
  
    The wind picks up, Suga’s shirt flapping around him, hair blowing into his wide eyes.  
  
    He looks around. He doesn’t know what he’s looking for, but something, _something_ , scratches at him, taps him on the shoulder and tells him to search for it.  
  
    Suga’s eyes fall on the dark stretch of trees that line the street, just past the metal guardrail where the flowers bloom and the birds caw strange noises through the gloom.  
  
    The dahlia’s look watery, transparent, waver in the flashing lights, the shadows around them suddenly growing and growing and growing, and Suga takes one step, two steps, three backwards, his heart suddenly in his throat, shivers wracking up his spine, fear creeping into his bones -  
  
    "Koushi!"  
  
    Suga jerks, whirling around, shock lancing through him in a sharp, painful burst.  
  
    Oikawa is jogging towards him, sneakers slapping the pavement, his leather jacket folded over an arm.  
  
     _"Don’t,"_ is what Suga wants to say. _"Stay back."_ Every piece of him is screaming at him to run, to flee, to tell Oikawa to get away -  
  
    But then it stops.  
  
    All of it vanishes. The streetlights flicker once and then hum back to life, steady and peaceful. The shadows retreat, the dahlias just look like flowers.  
  
    All of it, whatever Suga had been seeing — whatever he had been _imagining_ — is gone.  
  
    Suga gapes, knees wobbly, heart still hammering in his chest.  
  
     _"Fuck,"_ he thinks. He must be more inebriated than he had first thought.  
  
    It’s the only explanation for what just happened.  
  
    "What are you doing?" Oikawa asks as soon as he reaches him, slowing down a few feet away. A soft breeze ruffles his dark bangs, flutters the hem of his simple white t-shirt. Ripped jeans show off the long length of his legs, shadows pool in the dips of his clavicles.  
  
    He looks like some old movie star, standing there in front of Suga on the empty road, beautiful eyes searching Suga’s face. The odd look he had been wearing earlier is gone.  
  
    Suga opens his mouth, ready to blurt out that he’s losing his mind, ready to tell Oikawa about the two times that he’s thought he’s seen something that shouldn’t be where it is. His hands are shaking.  
  
    But it sounds crazy, even in Suga’s head. There’s no way he can explain what he’s seen. It’s not even real, just hallucinations built from lack of sleep and caffeine and alcohol.  
  
    So Suga pushes it away, glances just once more over at the flowers and then back towards Oikawa.  
  
    He almost wishes he could draw him right now, etch out his figure in black and white, ivory and pink flowers blooming from his fingertips.  
  
    "I’m going home," Suga answers, glad that his voice sounds mostly normal. Another sea-salt wind tumbles down the street and Suga hugs his arms around himself tighter, forces himself to forget, forces himself to not look back over the guardrail.  
  
     _"Nothing,"_ he tells himself. _"It was nothing. You just need to sleep."_  
  
    Oikawa automatically unfolds his jacket from his arm as Suga shivers, steps forward to tug it around Suga’s shoulders.  
  
    "Where’s your jacket?" he asks, fingertips barely brushing Suga’s neck. Suga trembles again, but not from the cold.  
  
    "I left it inside," Suga mumbles. He tries not to notice how nice Oikawa smells, tries not to look into those brown eyes that he knows so well, tries not to let himself crumble and collapse into Oikawa’s chest, clutch him close and never leave.  
  
    The irritation from before has faded now that Oikawa’s here, standing close and not looking at Suga as if he were a stranger.  
  
    All Suga feels now is exhaustion. And he needs water and painkillers.   
  
    All he wants is to sleep and forget every nice thing that Oikawa’s ever done for him.  
  
    Oikawa is quiet a moment. Suga doesn’t know what else to say.  
  
    "Come on," Oikawa says finally, winding a firm arm around Suga’s shoulders. "I’ll walk with you."  
  
    He begins to move, pulling Suga with him, but Suga resists.  
  
    "You don’t have to leave," he protests, glancing back over his shoulder at the bar. "What about -"  
  
    "Daishō’s a big boy," Oikawa cuts in before Suga can finish. "He can get home by himself. I already told him I was leaving. Besides I’m not just going to let you walk back alone. What kind of best friend would I be then?"  
  
    He’s trying to act nonchalant, an easy smile on his face, but there’s bitterness in his tone. It threads through his voice like the distant crash of waves against the shore.  
  
    Suga doesn’t prod, just looks up at Oikawa’s face. It’s thrown into shadow again, unreadable.   
  
    He knows Oikawa won’t tell him anything until he’s ready.  
  
    So he swallows down the questions building up in his throat, lets Oikawa pull him forward.  
  
    And somewhere, deep down, he hates himself for feeling even the tiniest bit happy that Oikawa is with him instead.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm back with KuroSuga （＾～＾；）
> 
> the next chapter probably won't be a time-skip like this one was, so be prepared for late-night OiSuga walking home and maybe making a detour on the wayyyyyy
> 
> and, as always, feel free to leave comments and visit my blog [here](oisugasuga.tumblr.com)


	3. blood in the water

"Better?"  
  
    Suga pauses with a fry held halfway to his lips, glances up. Oikawa is full-on smirking at him.  
  
    Suga sniffs daintily and then pops the entire fry into his mouth at once, smiling softly at Oikawa’s laugh.  
  
    His laugh is similar to Kuroo’s, just as genuine. But it’s brighter, somehow, to Suga’s ears.  
  
    Oikawa’s eyes crinkle up when he laughs. His nose does too.  
  
    "Much better," Suga answers, looking away to wipe his greasy fingers on a napkin. He sighs, leans back in the booth.  
  
    Denny’s is surprisingly full for how early in the morning it is. There’s a trio of girls by the front counter who just ordered five stacks of pancakes, an elderly woman over by the window, and a group of what look like high school kids in the back, hunched over cups of coffee.  
  
    Fast food is exactly what Suga had needed to quell the nausea in his stomach and the horrendous ache in his head — along with the painkillers that Oikawa had so graciously bought him from the pharmacy down the hill. And lots and lots of water.  
  
    Somehow they had detoured here — to the Denny’s that has seen many drunken nights and last-minute cram sessions — instead of making it back to Suga’s place. He figures he has about another hour before Kumiko or his mom start calling.  
  
    He drains the last bit of ice-water slush in the bottom of his current glass.  
  
    Oikawa is tapping something out over his phone quickly, his half-cup of black coffee — the way he usually drinks it unless Parallels has something new and intriguing to try — sitting by his elbow.  
  
    "Keiji asked if I wanted anything from In-N-Out for dinner," Oikawa says without looking up. "And considering that _you_ ate half of my burger, I might have to say yes."  
  
    "Hey," Suga defends, glancing down at the aftermath of their late-night food crawl, crumpled aluminum wrappers and ketchup stains and little bits of burnt fries scattered over the table. "You offered it, so don’t blame me for accepting."  
  
    Oikawa looks up with a wicked grin on his face.  
  
    "Oh," he drawls, "does that mean you would accept _anything_ I offered then?"  
  
    Without warning, the tip of Oikawa’s sneaker runs slow and suggestive up the length of Suga’s left calf under the table while Oikawa waggles his eyebrows.  
  
    "Tooru," Suga squeaks, laughing and shoving Oikawa’s leg away with his foot. "Weirdo."  
  
    "Nerd," Oikawa shoots back, sticking out his tongue.  
  
    They grapple for dominance for a second until Oikawa traps both of Suga’s legs between his own, Suga laughing loud enough that the older woman by the window looks over.  
  
    When Oikawa grins at him victoriously Suga can’t stop the rush of contentment that floods his veins like brine and saltwater.  
  
    Oikawa’s face is so familiar, every freckle, every scar, the way his lips curve and the brightness of his eyes.  
  
    And then Suga catches sight of his own expression in the reflection of the metal napkin dispenser.  
  
    And he realizes what that look had been that he hadn’t been able to place on Daishō’s face in the bar.  
  
    Yearning.  
  
    Suga’s heart sinks.  
  
    Clearing his throat, he disentangles himself without thinking about it, pretending to wipe at a fake smudge of mustard on his pants.  
  
    He can feel the weight of Oikawa’s eyes on him a beat later. Too late does he realize that, somehow, he’s managed to make yet another natural moment between them painfully and noticeably awkward.  
  
    That seems to be happening more and more often, much more often than Suga would like, much more than he’s comfortable with.  
  
     _"Damn it."_  
  
    "Let’s go to Seal Rocks," Suga says brightly, looking back up, forcing every ounce of nonchalance that he possesses into his voice. The suggestion is spontaneous but it isn’t too ridiculous even though it’s almost five in the morning. If they take the bus they can be there in twenty minutes, just in time for the sunrise.  
  
    Oikawa doesn’t speak at first. Suga’s pulse pounds at his wrists.  
  
    There’s that unreadable look again. The one Suga hates.  
  
    But then Oikawa’s face straightens out.  
  
    "Okay," he says brightly. "But on one condition."  
  
    Suga raises an eyebrow. Relief tingles at his fingertips.  
  
    "And that would be?" he asks. The girls near the counter shriek at something, dissolve into laughter a second later. The noise fills up the room, makes the eggshell walls and horrible upholstery seem a little less pathetic.  
  
    Oikawa leans forward with both elbows on the table, propping his chin on top of folded hands. Suga recognizes this look now, the one in his eyes that sparks and burns. Whatever he’s getting ready to ask, Oikawa is determined to get it.  
  
    "You’re going to tell me every little detail about your little rendezvous with our wonderful barista," he says, smirking, lips tilted up crookedly. "You never told me you and Tetsurō were so… _close_."  
  
    Suga flushes, stomach dropping. _"Of course,"_ he thinks. Why had he expected Oikawa to not bring it up sooner or later? They tell each other everything.  
  
    Suddenly Suga regrets suggesting Seal Rocks.   
  
    It had been a split-second, desperate attempt to salvage the atmosphere and now he has to spend another hour or so talking to Oikawa about a random bar hookup that he had only had _because_ of Oikawa.  
  
    Oikawa watches him expectantly, amusement written all over the tilt of his eyebrows and the angle of his grin. His neck is littered with old and new hickies, faded and bold like varying strokes of ink across paper.  
  
     _"Why does it matter anyway?"_ Suga thinks, giving in. _"It’s not like anything’s going to come of you and Kuroo anyway."_  
  
    "Deal," Suga relents, plastering an easy smile on his face. "Ready?"  
  
    He gets up, adjusting Oikawa’s top because it keeps slipping off of his shoulders, and heads for the door.  
  
     _"It’ll be fine,"_ he thinks.  
  
    And yet, the entire time, he can feel Oikawa’s eyes on his back — and he can’t shake the image of Oikawa’s expression in the bar or forget how he had felt there, perched in Kuroo’s lap.  
  
    Uneasiness shivers over the back of his neck. Dahlias waver in the fluorescent lighting of the restaurant.  
  
     _"Get it together."_  
  
  
  
They hear the crash of the waves before they actually see the ocean. The two of them are quiet, lost in their own thoughts.  
  
    Walking side-by-side down the sleepy residential streets, Suga is grateful for the silence.  
  
    The bus had been crowded with early morning risers, moon-pale faces and coffee-stained teeth — people headed to work, people out to capture the sunrise, people with nowhere else to be.  
  
    But now Oikawa and Suga are completely alone. They walk down streets lined with pastel, two-level houses, the hush of lawn sprinklers ticking through the air.  
  
    Suga’s wearing Oikawa’s jacket again, had tugged it on over his arms and shoulders at Oikawa’s request before they had caught the 38R. He inhales leather and cologne and salty air.  
  
    Seal Rocks looms up out of the dusky morning gloom all at once. The houses unfurl and disappear, the ground spreading out into sand and interspersed crags of white stone.  
  
    The sea is a massive, still beast. It rumbles, gentle waves breaking the shore. Great cliffs of the same rock break the surface farther out, their shadowy shapes like ancient sea monsters popping towering heads above water.  
  
    "Maybe we should’ve just gone home," Suga mutters, teeth chattering. It’s freezing here, closer to the ocean, the spring chill of March and April not having fully melted away yet despite it being almost June.  
  
    Oikawa tilts his head to look over at him. The wind blows his dark bangs over his forehead.  
  
    "Where’s your sense of adventure, Kou?" he asks, smirking again. "Seal Rocks is full of things to be discovered."  
  
    Suga rolls his eyes. "If you mean discovering sand hidden in parts of me I didn’t know I had later, then you’re right," he answers, smirking at Oikawa’s facial expression.  
  
    "Remember that one time we found that cigarette lighter and you used it to burn your name into that piece of driftwood?" Oikawa asks as they walk farther out into the soft sand.  
  
    "I was thinking more about when we found that pair of fuzzy handcuffs up by the cliffs," Suga snickers, remembering the hot pink fuzz matted by seawater and sand. There had been a half-used tube of lipgloss near it — _Blood Orange Sunrise_ or something like that.  
  
    Oikawa grimaces. "Right, that was disgusting. This is a family beach. _Children_ come here to see the seals."  
  
    Suga laughs again, the sound snatched away by the wind.  
  
    He pauses to untie his sneakers, then toes them off and stuffs his socks in the mouths. The sand is fine and cool beneath his bare feet. He leaves his Converse tucked into the soft ground.  
  
    Oikawa follows suit, rolls the ends of his ripped jeans up above his ankles. His white t-shirt glows in the hazy, blue air.  
  
    They keep going. The sunrise is barely visible. It turns the horizon a watery shade of gold, creeps up against the dusk like the gilt over old Renaissance paintings.  
  
    Oikawa’s right, Suga thinks as they stroll farther towards the waterline. Seal Rocks has always been a treasure trove of miscellaneous junk.  
  
    Together they’ve found a vast assortment of things. A rubber duck, lots of empty wine bottles, tons of different colored sea glass, an unopened pregnancy test kit, an old, waterlogged Atari, various rusted keys, condoms, several tubes of lipstick, gum wrappers, and a lot of fake jewelry.  
  
    "So…"  
  
    Oikawa’s voice cuts through Suga’s thoughts.  
  
    They’ve made it close enough to feel the spray of the water against their faces and Suga blinks, looks up, brushes his bangs from his eyes.  
  
    "Have you and Tetsurō been together… long?" Oikawa is glancing at Suga out of the corner of his eye, voice oddly hesitant even though he had been so sure-footed back at Denny’s.  
  
    That familiar crawl of heat tickles the back of Suga’s neck. He turns his face more towards the sea breeze, inhales salt and thinks back to Kuroo in the club.  
  
    "Not really," he answers truthfully. "It was random."  
  
    Oikawa’s silent. And then, "So are you gonna see him again? I mean, Kuroo’s hot, I’ll give you that."  
  
    Suga chances a look at his best friend. Oikawa’s lips are quirked like he’s teasing but his voice doesn’t quite reach that same pitch.  
  
    "Maybe," Suga answers after a beat.  
  
    He doesn’t know why he’s being so vague. But, then again, talking to the person you want but can’t have about someone you hooked up with for kicks isn’t that pleasant either.  
  
    And Oikawa isn’t being as pushy as Suga had been expecting.  
  
   _"Why would he care that much?"_ some annoying voice in the back of his head asks snidely. _"It’s not like you haven’t dated people in the past that he never really knew. Or hooked up with for that matter."_  
  
    "Well," Oikawa says, stopping suddenly and grabbing Suga’s wrist to keep him from walking farther, "I hope everything works out for you."  
  
    Suga’s brows furrow automatically at the words. They’re so formal, so — _final_.  
  
    They’re not what he had been expecting.  
  
    Oikawa’s fingers are warm and steady around Suga’s wrist, braced right above Suga’s quick pulse. The sun blooms over the horizon finally, paints Oikawa’s cheekbones, the long lengths of his eyelashes, the tips of his hair with gold, with cerise.  
  
    They’re close enough that Suga can count the number of freckles over the bridge of Oikawa’s nose — close enough to see something different in his eyes that Suga hadn’t noticed until this moment.   
  
    Oikawa searches his face for something that Suga doesn’t know how to give.  
  
    "Tooru," Suga breathes without realizing it until the name leaves his lips, the air hitching in his throat. Oikawa’s hand has slid from his wrist to tangle with Suga’s fingers instead, his breath whispers over Suga’s temple.  
  
    The space between them is barely a crack to let the sunrise through. Suga doesn’t remember when Oikawa got so close.  
  
    Overwhelmed by the proximity, overwhelmed by the look Oikawa is wearing on his face — something vulnerable and new — overwhelmed by the warmth of Oikawa’s fingers around his, Suga opens his mouth to speak.  
  
    He doesn’t know what he’s going to say, but the words bubble up anyway, there in the back of his throat — hidden treasures that the sea is relinquishing.  
  
    And the shrill ring of a cellphone interrupts the quiet.  
  
    Oikawa drops his hand like he’s been burned.  
  
    Suga’s heart skips a beat, one of his jeans pockets buzzing as his phone goes off. He scrabbles for the device, swallowing past a lump in his throat and turning away to look at the caller ID.  
  
    Kumiko. Of course. Relief and irritation fight for ground in Suga’s stomach and neither one wins.  
  
    Suga ends the call, pulls up his text messages. _"I’ll be home in half an hour,"_ he sends quickly.  
  
    "Sorry," he says out loud, clearing his throat. "I should probably get home."  
  
    Oikawa slings an arm around Suga’s shoulders. Whatever just happened, whatever odd moment had passed between the two of them, it’s gone now. Oikawa seems lighter, less conflicted.  
  
    Suga doesn’t dwell on it. He’s had enough of weird, fleeting moments lately. And both of them are tired, running on greasy fast food and alcohol, still dressed in their bar clothes and covered in smudged eyeliner and sticky cologne.  
  
    "Welllll," Oikawa sing-songs, dragging Suga around until their bare feet are splashing around in shallow water, navigating them back towards the way they’ve come, "I guess there’s only one other thing left to do before we leave."  
  
    Suga raises an eyebrow, kicking at the small waves. "If you’re gonna suggest digging for 'gently-used' swim trunks again, count me out -"   
  
    In one swift move, Oikawa plucks Suga’s phone from his hand. He sweeps Suga’s legs out from under him in the another, fitting a strong arm under his knees, lifts him bridal style so fast that Suga’s head spins, his voice lost somewhere in his throat.  
  
    They’re one step, two steps into the ocean, Suga cradled to Oikawa’s warm chest, when he finds it again, realizes too late what’s happening.  
  
    "Tooru!" Suga yells — right before he’s airborne.  
  
    The sea catches him just as Suga squeezes his eyes shut and remembers to hold his breath.  
  
    One, large, ice-cold shock travels all of the way up Suga’s spine. The breath gets knocked from his lungs as if frost-tipped fingernails have reached in and drug it out of him, pulling it up his throat until he’s gasping, sucking down saltwater.  
  
    He surfaces a moment later, feet finding slick, slimy sand in the shallow water, coughing and sputtering, teeth chattering, sunlight blinding him as it refracts off of the seawater clinging to his eyelashes.  
  
    Oikawa is guffawing, bent over double, the lower halves of his jeans soaked through and dark, eyes squeezed shut as he laughs loud and carefree.  
  
    Suga growls. Oikawa’s borrowed clothes cling to every inch of him, his wet bangs are plastered to his forehead.  
  
    Without saying a word, Suga is upon Oikawa in a heartbeat.  
  
    He tackles him into the shallows, satisfaction billowing in his chest as Oikawa’s dark, perfect head of hair gets dunked below the waves, his startled shout swallowed up by the water.  
  
    "You little… shit," Oikawa says — half-panting, half-laughing — as soon as he pops back up, hands finding Suga’s waist as they wrestle against each other, legs tangling, bare skin slipping against each other. "You’ll pay for that. Also… I had both of our phones… so…"  
  
    "Fuck-," Suga starts — just now remembering — but Oikawa has hooked a leg behind both of his and he tugs, sending Suga tumbling backwards, once more disappearing below the water.  
  
    The ocean muffles the outside world. They’ve waded out farther than they had originally started during their play fight, tugged out quickly by the tide, and Suga can’t feel the sharp pieces of broken shells beneath his feet anymore, the water suddenly much deeper than before.   
  
    Oikawa’s shirt with the cut-out back billows around Suga like bird wings.  
  
    Something brushes against his elbow as he kicks towards the surface, eyes just barely cracked open to see where he’s going, stinging with salt.  
  
    It’s soft and fine, different from the random chunks of kelp that sometimes wash ashore.  
  
    Suga turns towards it.  
  
    Dead eyes, gray and dull, little fish swarming around to peck and pluck at them until the white, smooth bone of eye sockets are visible. A bloated, blistered face — green and black, distorted past recognition — pale, blue-tinged lips stretched up into a twisted, macabre grin. Colorless skin, peeling off in soggy chunks as the sea grinds down muscle and bone. Dark hair that floats behind the corpse in a billowing, hazy cloud, a necklace that glints and gleams around a swollen neck.  
  
    Three gaping, horrible slashes from hip to sternum, the entire front of a bright yellow sundress covered in bloodstains.  
  
    The body of a woman hangs suspended in the sea.  
  
    Suga screams, his cry lost in saltwater and blood.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (ﾉ＾◡＾)ﾉ︵ ┻━┻
> 
> blog --> [hereeeeeeeeee](http://oisugasuga.tumblr.com/)
> 
> also, idk if anyone else watches Riverdale but I was definitely inspired for the title for this chapter by [this song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXnrp8rhCcA) and the scene that they used it in for the show was .·´¯`(>▂<)´¯`·.


	4. storm clouds on the horizon

The lights on the cop cars flash in candy colors. Blue, white, red. Blue, white, red. Blue, white, red.  
  
    Suga stares at them, at how many times they color his skin. It’s better than the alternative.  
  
    It’s better than watching the people out on the water drag the ocean for a dead woman’s body, her sunflower yellow dress lost in the dark of the waves.  
  
     _"Oh God,"_ Suga thinks then. The nausea that he’s been holding down this entire time rises to the surface again. It feels like the entire sea lies in the pit of his stomach, swelling and crescendoing.  
  
    It feels like Suga is trapped in a nightmare.  
  
    "Hey."  
  
    Oikawa appears suddenly by his side, sits down on the end of the boardwalk, his shoulder brushing Suga’s.  
  
    Suga doesn’t answer.  
  
    His throat has been scratched raw.  
  
    The saltwater he had swallowed, all of the screaming he had done — he has no energy and little ability to talk.  
  
    "Here," Oikawa says. He readjusts the scratchy, heavy blanket someone had thrown over Suga’s shoulders in all of the bustle and buzz that reporting a dead body had sparked. It’s been slowly slipping off of him for a few minutes but Suga is too tired to care.  
  
    "And I got us these," Oikawa adds into the silence. He produces two to-go coffee cups from behind him, pushes one into Suga’s cold hands.  
  
    It’s warm and smells nice, something like honey and vanilla, maybe nutmeg.  
  
    Suga’s fingertips are ice-cold.  
  
    Out on the water, small boats slough back and forth, sweeping, searching.  
  
    A bird farther up on the beach, closer to the boardwalk and the street behind it, screeches, sharp and piercing in the sunny, humid air.  
  
    The sea is quiet.  
  
    Dead eyes, gray skin, white bone. Yellow dress, bloodless lips, cold jewelry. Three long slashes, from hip to sternum -  
  
    "Kou."  
  
    Warm hands wrap around the outside of Suga’s frozen ones. Suga looks down instead of towards the sound of his friend’s voice.  
  
    Oikawa’s fingers are just a little bit longer than his, just enough to wrap comfortably around Suga’s paler ones.  
  
    "Drink a little," Oikawa coaxes, voice soft, lifting their joined hands up to Suga’s mouth.  
  
    Suga does look at him then.  
  
    Oikawa’s clothes have dried, stiff with ocean water. His hair curls in disorganized tangles and waves around his head. There’s dried sand sprinkled across one cheek, like beach freckles.  
  
    "I think I’m -," Suga starts. His voice rasps like sandpaper. It hurts to talk.  
  
    But Oikawa’s paused, their hands still clasped. He waits, watches Suga’s face with careful brown eyes.  
  
    "I think I’m going _crazy_ ," Suga breathes, mouth trembling.  
  
    Oikawa lowers the styrofoam cup, takes it from Suga’s hands with gentle fingers and sets it down. He returns to gripping Suga’s hands.  
  
    "What’s wrong?" he asks. "Take a breath and tell me what’s wrong, okay?"  
  
    Suga inhales, bites his lower lip.   
  
    It’s hard to force the words up. It feels like trying to talk past sea glass that’s been shoved down his throat, the smooth stones stacked the way Kumiko sometimes likes to arrange them on their kitchen windowsill, choking him.  
  
    But Oikawa’s hands are warm against Suga’s frozen ones, his hold is steady. There’s nothing transparent or fleeting or half-there and half-not about him.  
  
    He’s here, flesh and blood and bone. Solid and real.  
  
    Suga inhales.  
  
  
  
The drive home is silent.  
  
    Himari Sugawara keeps a firm grip on the steering wheel, her eyes focused on the road.  
  
    The white edges to her knuckles give away her anxiety.  
  
    Suga can’t blame his mother for the crease of worry at the corner of her mouth, or for the dried tear stains on her tired face. Being called by the police in the early hours of the morning about your child and a dead body would do that to anyone.  
  
    Suga’s would’ve called her himself. But his phone sits waterlogged on the faded upholstery next to him and Oikawa had only had enough change to dial 911 at that payphone on the boardwalk.  
  
    Kumiko, at least, is still at home. Suga doesn’t know if he would’ve been able to take any more questions.  
  
    The police hadn’t found anything but clumps of kelp.  
  
     _"Tugged further out by the tide,"_ had been the general consensus. And then Suga and Oikawa had been free to leave — after a few hours of careful, grueling questions in a tiny, muggy office that smelled like mint Tic-Tacs and burnt coffee. They would be called back to the station if they were needed, they had been told.  
  
    Suga stares blindly out of the passenger-side window.   
  
     _"Where did you see the body?"_  
  
 _"What age did the woman appear to be around?"_  
  
 _"Any noticeable characteristics?"_  
  
    No eyes, three long slashes, blood on a yellow dress.  
  
    The car hits a bump int he road and Suga starts, pulse jumping at his wrists.  
  
    The sun beats down against his face.   
  
    A different question, unnerving and one entirely of his own, beats at the inside of his skull.  
  
     _"And what if she hadn’t existed at all?"_  
  
  
  
The comforters over Suga’s bed are nice and cool.  
  
    He falls onto them, buries his face in his pillow. Water from the shower drips from his still damp hair, dots the white with smudges of storm-cloud stains.  
  
    His mother hadn’t asked him much, had just let him shower and retreat to sleep. The police had practically told her everything they knew anyway, which had been nothing but a lot of unanswered questions.  
  
     _"Two college kids, hungover and taking an early morning swim, stumble across the corpse of an unidentified woman."_ Suga can see the headline now.  
  
    Turning over onto his back, Suga stares up at the ceiling.  
  
     _"You’re not crazy, Kou. I believe you."_  
  
    That’s what Oikawa had said back on the boardwalk as the seagulls screeched overhead and Suga tried to hold himself together. He had told Oikawa everything. The door in Parallels, the shadows outside of the bar, the fear he had that the woman he had seen in the water had been yet another hallucination even though it _couldn’t_ have been.  
  
    She had been too real. The blood on her dress had been too vivid. The fish swarming her body had been very much there, their silver scales rippling in the watery light below the surface.  
  
    What had happened to her? No doubt she had died from the wounds stretching across her body, but what kind of weapon had done that? A shark attack? A blade? Had she been murdered? Had it been an accident? Had she still been breathing when the waves closed down over her head?  
  
    Had she screamed with no one to hear her?  
  
    Suga squeezes his eyes shut.  
  
    And then he sits up. He needs to _do_ something and sleep is out of the question.  
  
    Pushing off of the bed, Suga drifts over to the large, white desk on the opposite wall, catty corner to the windows that look out over his mother’s flower garden below. Lupine, maidenhair fern, flared begonias and moonshine yarrow. Suga sometimes goes and lies in the grass, watches the clouds drift by, framed by the petals.  
  
    He turns his attention back to his drawing desk, back to the half-done pencil sketches strewn over the surface and his dark, glossy computer screen. The white wall behind it is decorated with just a few of his favorite finished pieces.  
  
    Grabbing his current sketchbook and a pencil, Suga returns to his bed, sits cross-legged in the middle of it. Overhead, hanging over to the left, the homemade, sea-glass mobile that he had made a few years ago tinkles in the breeze coming through the cracked windows, the shards catching the sunlight in varying shades of green — pale jade and dark emerald and sea-foam.  
  
    Without thinking about it, Suga lets his hand drift. The tip of the pencil scratches over the paper, lead on wood pulp. He likes to do this before he turns to his digital pen and screen, likes to feel the roughness of the sketchpad beneath his fingers, likes to smudge the gray pencil lines with his thumb.  
  
    He draws and lets his mind run blank. He forgets about sea salt in his eyes, forgets about what it had felt like to have Oikawa’s warm skin against his own, forgets about coughing up brine and screaming and the horrible image forever burned on the backs of his eyelids.  
  
    Outside the sun continues to rise in the sky. Life continues on. Oikawa’s words echo in Suga’s ears.  
  
     _"What you saw was real, out there in the water. I saw it in your eyes when you looked at me."_  
  
    The distant wail of sirens echoes in the distance, somewhere in the city, lonely and odd against the closer sound of children laughing as they play outside, the hum of music that comes from his sister’s room.  
  
    Kumiko had done nothing but wrap him in a silent hug when he had walked in, and then she had let him have his space, her plum-streaked, silver hair disappearing behind her bedroom door.  
  
    Suga wonders. He wonders despite his insistence to forget.  
  
    He wonders if the police have found her, the woman from the sea, the woman with hair as dark as an oil spill, floating around her still face. He wonders if they’ve identified her, if they’ve found any clues on her dress, under her fingernails, somewhere in the glittering depths of that necklace she had been wearing, a sapphire-blue gemstone that hung just at the hollow of her throat.  
  
    He wonders what he would find if he went back.  
  
    For a moment, Suga’s hand slows. He stares at the seemingly normal surroundings of his room. The white bedcovers, the hardwood floors, the heap of schoolbooks and crumpled papers and gum wrappers near his desk, his forever-growing collection of sea glass stacked between the books lined up neatly on the bookcase in the corner, his paintings and sketches and digital art framed up on the walls, the scattered polaroids of him and Oikawa that are taped to the space behind his bed.  
  
    For a moment, _this_ is what seems fake, what’s out there is what seems real.  
  
    For a moment, he actually considers returning to Seal Rocks.  
  
    But then Suga remembers police tape and little boats searching the water and the smell of bad coffee as a policewoman recorded his answers to her questions.  
  
    He can’t go back, no matter how much he wants to _prove_ to himself that what he saw is real.  
  
    He continues to draw.  
  
    But maybe -  
  
    More minutes trickle by, lost in the soft breeze, in the faint sound of the television playing downstairs, in the lazy tick tick tick of someone’s lawn sprinkler.  
  
    Storm clouds drift on the horizon.  
  
    Suga draws and draws without really seeing what he’s creating, without really thinking about it. He sets his pencil down beside him when he’s finished.  
  
    Looking down at his sketchpad, Suga swallows past the sudden tightness in his throat at the sight that greets him.  
  
    And then he makes up his mind. He’s going back to that bar, to where the wind had howled and the flowers had bled colors and the shadows had reached for him with searching, sticky fingers. He’s going back tonight.  
  
    It’s more accessible than Parallels or the beach, easier to explore. And he needs _something_.  
  
    Getting off of his bed, Suga drops the sketch he’s finished half-thinkingly onto his bed, face-down. His fingers tingle with the shock of what he’s just drawn. The image is there, hanging in front of his mind’s eye.  
  
    Oikawa. Standing in front of an ocean as still as silence, holding out his hands, palms up. Shadows at his back, curling around his neck like smoke, colorless dahlias blooming from his open mouth.  
  
    And even though Suga can’t see it on paper, he can see what he would’ve added had he had the tools for it — crimson staining the front of a white shirt, bleeding down pale arms, dripping from fingertips.  
  
    The same wounds as the body of the woman in the water.  
  
    Somewhere, deep down, Suga wonders who’s next.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> kind of short oops but there'll be a lot more in the coming chapters and I wanted to get something out here for chapter 4
> 
> as always, thank you all for reading and telling me what you think!! feedback is one of the best things I can receive
> 
> click on the kitty to visit my blog [=＾● ⋏ ●＾=](http://oisugasuga.tumblr.com/)


	5. down the rabbit hole

The house is so quiet that Suga is afraid to breathe.  
  
    It’s a house built of matchsticks and one wrong step, one little noise, and the whole thing will come toppling down.  
  
    Not that he hasn’t done this before — sneaking out.  
  
    The back door is creaky but Suga’s learned over the years how to twist the doorknob just so and how to wait for the muffling hum of the refrigerator to fully click on before he delicately shoves the door open.  
  
    He does that now, slipping out into the cool embrace of late-night air, the dew on the grass tickling at his ankles.  
  
    The city is never really quiet. The sounds reach his ears as Suga moves carefully past the coiled-up watering hose and avoids the crate of gardening supplies that his mother keeps carefully organized by the back door — a pair of gardening shears glints in the dim lighting behind his house, sharp edges and unforgiving metal.  
  
    Suga wonders how hard a person would have to shove with those to carve through skin and muscle and bone. He swallows past the bitterness on his tongue.  
  
    He’s undeniably nervous. The edge of knowing where he’s headed presses cool to the nape of his neck, a blade of doubt and fear and hardened resolution, a heavy dose of naivety.  
  
    But — with one last look back at the house, hoping that neither Kumiko or his mother had heard him — Suga slips over the low, sagging fence in the back and into the neighbor’s yard, disappearing into the shadows.  
  
  
  
It’s warmer tonight that it had been yesterday. Suga finds himself slipping his black hoodie off and tying it around his waist, the collar of his t-shirt fluttering in the small breeze as he meanders down a cracked, empty sidewalk.  
  
    Yesterday is a blur. It melts into the foggy glow of the streetlights around him, the sharper flash of cars whizzing past and late-night buses trundling down the roads like giant, fluorescent beasts.  
  
    Suga tries not to dwell on it. The exhaustion that is slowly but surely creeping up on him helps.  
  
    Today had passed like honey poured through sand, sticky and slow and agonizing. Suga hadn’t been able to rest, not when he knew what the night would hold.  
  
    So he had drawn. Drawn and drawn and drawn until his fingers and the sides of his hands were covered in lead, until his back ached and his eyes burned.  
  
    He hadn’t really looked at any of his half-done sketches, had just ripped them out when he grew tired of them, had tossed them half-crumpled and fluttering to the floor like broken birds.  
  
    They had held horrors and delusions in the creases and lines of their wings.  
  
    A car honk startles Suga from his thoughts, sends his pounding heart up into his throat.  
  
    He feels like a deer caught in headlights for a moment — frozen, wide-eyed, terrified. _Hunted_.  
  
    But the car zips past, its burning taillights fading into the inky shadows.  
  
    Suga swallows hard against the lump in his throat.  
  
     _"This is crazy,"_ he thinks once the adrenaline bleeds from his veins a little bit. _"There won’t be anything there, in the trees by the flowers by the side of the road. It’s just a stretch of pavement."_  
  
    He looks around, realizes that he’s walked far enough to be in one of the more deserted areas of town, away from the heart of the city. It had taken a ten-minute bus ride and another ten minutes of walking, but Suga is sure he’s close to the bar from the other night.  
  
    It’s early enough in the morning — maybe around half past three — that all of the shops and restaurants around are closed, dark windows staring out at Suga like empty eyes. He shivers despite the muggy heat. The distant rumble of a bus echoes over the hot air, faint music filters down from the higher roads.  
  
    The cafes and strip malls eventually fade out, are replaced with dive bars and burger places.  
  
    Suga can smell salt on the air again, is starting to recognize the surroundings. He wishes the bars were still open so he could spot the telltale neon pink lights of the one Oikawa had dragged him to.  
  
   _"I wish Oikawa -"_  
  
    The thought is already halfway through his head before Suga shuts it down.   
  
    He’s not dragging Oikawa any more into this than he already has. Seeing his best friend’s face out there on the boardwalk had been enough. The woman in the waves may have been very much real — but that didn’t mean anything else had been.   
  
    Suga’s doing this alone tonight.  
  
  
  
 _"Realities."_  
  
    Suga recognizes the name as soon as he sees it. It had been buried somewhere in his mind, sunk under the buzz of alcohol and heartache from the previous night.  
  
    The bar sits dark and quiet, down here on the corner of two intersecting streets. The stretch of trees yawns behind it, up past the guardrails. Suga faces the locked doors of Realities as if they’ll open and give him an answer.   
  
    He can see the crazy love dahlias from here if he turns his head. Anticipation shivers over his skin, fear drags a long-tipped fingernail down his face lovingly, but Suga steels himself and forces his feet to move.  
  
    The streetlights are steady and true. They wash out Suga’s skin as he turns to walk farther up the road, re-tracing his steps from last night. He glances down at his arms, at pale, pale skin, marked through with the darkness of his veins. The blood rushes at his wrists, up at the strong column of his throat.  
  
    And then he’s there — standing on the same stretch of hot pavement as before, the sea-salt breeze ruffling his bangs, settling on the tip of his tongue.  
  
     _"Crazy,"_ his mind tells him.  
  
    And he does feel crazy, standing here just a few hours before dawn, having snuck out of his own house like a thief in the night, wandering down the streets like a ghost and stopping to stare at a very ordinary, very _empty_ stretch of road.  
  
    "God," Suga mutters out loud. He runs a hand through his hair in frustration.  
  
    There’s nothing here. Just flowers and trees and sparse grass and dirt and gravel and the yellow and white lines of the street behind him, pointing back home as if to tell him to leave, as if to tell him that this had been nothing but the actions of a boy traumatized by seeing death so close and nothing more than that.  
  
    And yet Suga hesitates.  
  
    He wavers here, keeps his sneakers firmly planted, runs a finger over the smooth edge of the guardrail just in front of him.  
  
    Maybe if he waits long enough he’ll see it again — the shadows reaching out for him with beckoning arms, the flickering lights and bleeding colors, the wind pushing him forward as if to whisper, _"Jump. Go ahead and jump."_  
  
    Maybe he’ll be able to prove at least to himself that some of it is real.  
  
     _"Why?"_ his brain asks him. _"Why do you want this so badly? Wouldn’t it be better for there to be nothing? Wouldn’t it be easier?"_  
  
    Suga frowns to himself, worries at his lower lip with his teeth.  
  
    It would be easier. It would be so much simpler to admit that he’s just been imagining things, that it had been a trick of the light or that he had just been that tired.  
  
    But the body in the ocean had been too much, had happened to close to the strange winds out here, to the dizzying shimmer of the door in Parallels. Suga _needs_ to know.  
  
    And the look on Oikawa’s face -  
  
    The look on Oikawa’s face when Suga had told him everything had hurt.   
  
    Sure, Oikawa believed him. He believed everything that had come out of Suga’s mouth. But the concern, the _pity_ , that Suga knew he would inevitably see had been too much.  
  
    A sharp pain lances up through the finger Suga’s been pressing to the guardrail. He glances down, realizes belatedly that he’s pressed hard enough against a corrugated edge to slice his index finger open. Blood pools against his skin, alternating between appearing black in the shadows and bright crimson in the fluorescent streetlight.  
  
    The pain clears some of the frustrated determination clouding Suga’s thoughts. All of the sudden he’s completely and utterly exhausted.  
  
    The flowers bow and sway in the breeze, mocking in their movements, telling him to go home.  
  
    Suga glances once more up into the dips and crevices of the tree-line. Nothing. Nothing but the elegant lines of Swan Hill olives and Chinese elms.  
  
    Suga takes one more breath, inhales the tangy night air, and then turns to leave, quiet resignation settling between his bones.  
  
    He’s not more than two steps down the road when a shadow falls over his, taller and stronger, and Suga’s breath catches in the hollow of his throat before he can look up.  
  
    When he does, neck whipping up out of instinct, the only sight that greets him for a few, nerve-wracking seconds is a boy clouded in darkness, caught in one of the gaps between the streetlamps, the glint of his eyes the only color in the dark street.  
  
    But the moment passes in a heartbeat, the shadows slink away to reveal no one other than Kuroo.  
  
    Suga gapes, his lungs still struggling to pull in enough air, heartbeat rattling his ribcage. _"What are the odds?"_ he thinks.  
  
    Kuroo’s eyes mimic Suga’s surprise, but that fades as quickly as Suga manages to rein himself back under control.  
  
    "Koushi?"  
  
    Suga swallows past a dry mouth, wipes sweating palms down over his jeans. Kuroo is dressed similarly, dark jeans and an old, faded t-shirt with some kind of dinosaur pun slapped across the front of it.  
  
    "Hey," Suga manages, willing his lips up into a smile. Too late does he remember how he had just up and left Kuroo last night at Realities. A faint rush of guilt makes him self-conscious. Kuroo probably thinks he’s your average, every-day asshole.  
  
    "What are you doing out here?" Kuroo asks, brows furrowed, glancing around as if he’s expecting Oikawa or Daishō to materialize.  
  
    Suga flounders for an answer, opening and then closing his mouth.  
  
    "I was out late, just walking home," he settles on, hoping its vague enough to not sound suspicious but not too much to warrant questions.  
  
    Kuroo’s eyes are sharp when they touch back onto Suga’s face. They’re too inquisitive for comfort and Suga gets the odd, unsettling feeling that Kuroo knows he’s lying. When Kuroo’s gaze slips past Suga’s shoulder and farther up the road, Suga almost feels like Kuroo knows why he’s out here in the first place.  
  
     _"That’s impossible,"_ he tells himself. _"Calm down."_  
  
    "What are you doing?" Suga asks out loud, in an attempt to curve the conversation away from himself.  
  
    Kuroo studies his face for a few more seconds before he sighs, running a hand through his bangs. "I was headed home too, just helped my sister and uncle clean up and close down." He jerks a thumb back towards the bar. "I had to take some trash around back."  
  
    Suga nods. An awkward silence descends on the two of them.  
  
    "Listen," Suga starts finally, the stoic set of Kuroo’s mouth and the yawning quiet becoming too much. "Last night, I didn’t mean -"  
  
    But the rest of his words die down as cool, gentle fingers wrap around the wrist of the hand that Suga had subconsciously half-raised to nervously rub the back of his neck while he had been talking.  
  
    Kuroo isn’t looking at Suga’s face anymore. His eyes have dropped to the arm he’s holding.  
  
    "You’re hurt?" he says, something finally coloring his voice — worry and confusion.  
  
    "What -," Suga asks, bewildered, but then he sees the rivulet of blood trailing down over his wrist, down to his elbow, wonders how he hadn’t felt it before. The gash in his finger must be deeper than he had first thought, weeping red so that is runs sticky over his skin, so that his palm and fingers are covered in it. "Oh, yeah, I cut my finger earlier…"  
  
    Kuroo’s eyes flash back to his face as Suga trails off, his hand still carefully gripping Suga’s wrist while avoiding touching his blood.  
  
    "You should probably get this cleaned," he says. "I know a place nearby, just down the road, if you’re okay with it."  
  
    Suga debates internally for a moment. He’s not sure what "place" Kuroo has in mind, but now that the cut has been brought to his attention, it is kind of painful, stinging and still pushing out blood.   
  
    And Kuroo isn’t necessarily a stranger.  
  
    Besides Suga still feels bad for not getting the chance to apologize.  
  
    "Okay," he answers, peering up at Kuroo’s face. "Lead the way."  
  
    Kuroo’s mouth quirks a little at that, but he doesn’t say anything, just lets go of Suga’s arm and turns around to start walking the way Suga had originally been going.  
  
    Suga follows, careful to keep his injured hand away from his shirt. The last thing he needs is for his mother or Kumiko to catch him coming home at an odd time with bloodstains on his clothes. Too late does he realize that at some point he’s wiped the blood down the front of his jeans, a long, dark streak of it. He sighs internally.  
  
    As they pass Realities, a question surfaces in Suga’s mind.  
  
    "Does your uncle bartend too?" he asks, now walking shoulder to shoulder with Kuroo.  
  
    Kuroo tilts his head to the side, worn-down sneakers scuffing the blacktop, and then hesitantly answers, "He owns the place." There’s a trace of chagrin to his voice. "I don’t usually tell people that when I’m there, it makes me seem… uppity."  
  
    "Oh," Suga responds, remembering their conversation from before, about Kuroo’s sister. But this makes more sense considering that Kuroo’s out here so late, taking out trash.  
  
    Silence descends once more as they walk, turning right as they reach the end of the current street, winding past chain-link fences overgrown with honeysuckle. Suga inhales the saccharine fragrance, sweet and heady. He almost wishes that he could curl up amongst the leaves and vines and petals, that he could fall asleep cradled in the soothing smell.  
  
    But of course he can’t. He has to keep marching forward, weighed down by his own paranoia, dripping blood onto the concrete below.  
  
    Taking a small, steeling breath, Suga speaks again.  
  
    "About the other night," he starts, clenching the fingers of his uninjured hand into a fist, "I didn’t mean -"  
  
    "It’s okay," Kuroo interrupts, chancing a glance sideways. The streetlights catch the edge of his jaw, the tips of his hair, turn them silver. "Suguru ruined the night anyway, and his boyfriend didn’t look too happy either when he went after you."  
  
    Suga winces inwardly at the mention of Oikawa. He remembers something Kuroo had mentioned the other night at the same time.  
  
    "Who’s Mika?" he asks, careful not to look at Kuroo in case the other sees the burning curiosity in his eyes. He keeps his voice steady, nonchalant.  
  
    But Kuroo is stopping, slowing to a standstill. He rubs the back of his neck almost ruefully.  
  
    "That’s really Daishō’s right to talk about, despite what I said last night," he says, a hint of an apology in his tone. "Especially since you’re friends with his latest boy toy."  
  
     _"Boy toy,"_ Suga thinks, wondering how Oikawa would feel about being called that. Personally he doesn’t like how Kuroo had added on the word "latest" to the front of it.  
  
    He doesn’t have much time to think about it though because Kuroo is brushing past him, gesturing for Suga to follow.  
  
    Suga turns and looks at where they’ve stopped.  
  
    "A tattoo parlor," he deadpans, unable to see much past the dark windows and the designs plastered over every available surface outside the shop.  
  
    The White Rabbit reminds Suga of a flashing eye in the gloom, clean glass catching the glow of anything passing by, neatly situated between the two businesses on either side of it and caught in a tangle of violet Loropetalum that spreads around its sides to form a low hedge.  
  
    Suga thinks of the white rabbit from the books he had read in middle school by Lewis Carroll, of Alice and Wonderland. He wonders whether he’d find a doorway to another world if he searched long enough in the shrubbery, wonders what would lie at the other end once he tumbled headfirst down it.  
  
    "Just follow me," Kuroo says, and he’s already halfway around to the back before Suga sighs and follows him, deciding that if Kuroo actually were a serial killer, he probably would’ve killed him somewhere a little more isolated.  
  
    There’s a clean, paved path hidden by the hedge, the dark shape of garbage cans a little farther back. Suga follows Kuroo’s silhouette until they’re standing in front of a side door, inset into the soft plaster wall. "Employees Only," it reads in block letters.  
  
    "You want to tell me why you decided to bring me to a tattoo shop at four in the morning?" Suga hisses once he’s within ear range, glancing up and down the path for any signs of a security camera or system. He’s pretty sure Kuroo’s uncle doesn’t own The White Rabbit too.  
  
    "Two of my friends run this place. They live upstairs and believe it or not, tattoo parlors have great first-aid supplies," Kuroo smirks. Suga resists rolling his eyes at the smug tone.  
  
    "And they won’t mind you knocking on their door this early?" Suga asks dubiously, seeing a million flaws with this spontaneous plan.  
  
    Kuroo is shaking his head before the question is fully out of Suga’s mouth. "They sleep weird hours. I was already on my way here earlier, Osamu promised me a touch-up." He gestures to the cat inked into his right wrist, to the elegant lines of its face and the gleaming silver eyes.  
  
    "Huh," is all Suga can manage before Kuroo knocks loudly on the door.  
  
    Barely five seconds tick past before it swings open. A tall, broad-shouldered boy stands on the other side. His hair is dove-gray, his bangs flipped to the left side, deadpan expression firmly in place. Suga stares up, feeling suddenly small standing next to Kuroo — who’s already taller by a half a foot at least — and facing Osamu’s towering frame.  
  
    "Osamu," Kuroo greets, grinning. "And Atsumu as well. I thought you’d be passed out by now, after the number of shots you bribed from my sister."  
  
    At Kuroo’s words, Suga blinks in surprise. A copycat image of the first boy has appeared beside him, with lighter hair and his bangs brushed to the opposite side of his forehead and a shit-eating, lazy smile on his lips.  
  
    Suga’s eyes dart between the two. _"Night and day,"_ he thinks.  
  
    The faint scent of cloves and something heavier wafts through the open door, mixing with the hot night air.  
  
    For the first time, Suga is unsure of whether he’d rather be here or back at home in his bed. There’s something… _unsettling_ about the twins. Almost as if they’re hiding something that Suga feels like he should be able to see but can’t, no matter how hard he stares at their handsome, identical faces.  
  
    But Atsumu’s grin is growing, he’s saying something back to Kuroo and laughing at Kuroo’s response before Suga can study them further and Kuroo is turning to him.  
  
    "After you," he says, beckoning to the open door like a prince of the night. His eyes flash in the gloom. Suga remembers the feel of Kuroo’s hands on his skin, the heat of his mouth at his neck and the wicked roll of his hips and shivers, partly from his sudden reluctance when faced with the unknown and the memory.  
  
    Suga looks down at his hand, at the blood that still drips slowly from the ends of his fingers, marking the ground below.  
  
    For the first time that night, Suga lets himself think of Oikawa — of familiar brown eyes and his dorky laugh and warm hands.  
  
    And then he steps through the door into The White Rabbit.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> big welcome to the Miya twinsss<3<3<3
> 
> I know a lot didn't happen in this chapter (although there was a lot of opportunity for it) but things will start to heat up soon!
> 
> rabbit hole to my blog --> [／(◕ x ≦ )＼](http://oisugasuga.tumblr.com/)


	6. dark eyes of mercy and the burn of hellfire

The White Rabbit almost smells like the house parties Suga used to sneak out to in high school — sweet and heady and somewhat stale.   
  
    The only thing it lacks is the musk of weed and Suga is grateful. He’s never liked the scent.  
  
    The door they’ve stepped through — Kuroo at Suga’s back — opens up into what looks like a tiny living room, two sofas crammed into the space, a flat-screen tv shoved up against the opposite wall. Despite the size, the floors gleam in a way that only expensive, mahogany wood does and there’s an elaborate painting that takes up a good portion of the wall adjacent to the television set.  
  
    Suga stares at it. It just _looks_ pricey — angels with sprawling wings of silver and gold and dark blue descend from above, their eyes lit with the fury of mercy and their elegant fingers wrapped tightly round great, golden swords. Demons crawl up from below, ink-black wings unfurling from between pointed shoulder blades, their beautiful, cold faces twisted into expressions of revenge, teeth bared, wicked-looking blades brandished before them.   
  
    Suga stares and stares, his heart thudding through his ribcage. It looks so real, so _vivid_ , that he imagines he can taste the blood of war on his tongue, that he can hear the shrieks of pain and anger and sorrow and feel the heat of the demons and the chill of the angels.  
  
    "Like it?"  
  
    Suga bites back a gasp of shock but he can’t help the little jump that runs through him at the voice that speaks suddenly behind him, close to his right ear. He turns as slow as he can manage, trying to school his features into calm.  
  
    Osamu — no, wait, Atsumu — grins at him, his arms folded lazily over his chest. He has two piercings that Suga hadn’t noticed earlier, two little silver hoops that hook through either side of his lower lip. They gleam in the dim light and Suga tastes the iron of blood in his mouth again — from his imagination or from the worrying nibble he has the habit of doing sometimes, Suga isn’t sure.  
  
    "It’s… different," Suga settles on.  
  
    Atsumu’s grin widens. His gaze flicks over Suga’s shoulder to settle on the masterpiece.   
  
    Suga can see the reflection of heaven and hell in his dark eyes.  
  
    "It _is_ different, isn’t it?" Atsumu muses. "A battle between the warriors of heaven and the princes of hell." His eyes return to Suga’s face and Suga bites back the involuntary shiver that runs down his spine.  
  
    "I’ve always thought it would be interesting to flip it upside down though." Atsumu’s gaze is solely focused on Suga’s now, eerily unwavering, intimidating almost. "It’s all about perspective, isn’t it? To decide who’s avenging and who’s being brought to mercy?"  
  
    Suga wants to respond but his tongue feels like it’s stuck to the roof of his mouth. His pulse races unnaturally fast at his wrists. He can’t help but flash back to that moment on the roadside, frozen in the headlights of that car, stuck in place and helpless. Hunted.  
  
    For some reason this complete stranger holds him captivated.  
  
    And he thinks of Atsumu’s words without really realizing it, imagines the painting turned the other way with the devils of hell crashing down from the clouds and the angels of heaven crawling up through blood-soaked earth.  
  
    Atsumu takes Suga’s silence as permission to continue. "Don’t you think it’s odd that we, the human race, were placed more near to hell than heaven?" His piercings flash. His eyes are steadfast, his voice almost bored if it weren’t for the slight tinge of excitement that turns it into a low drawl. Suga’s fingernails dig into his palms.   
  
    Atsumu leans forward — and his eyes burn.  
  
    "The monsters below are a lot closer than the clouds above."  
  
    "Atsumu!"  
  
    The spell is broken by Kuroo’s call, his voice drifting in from a doorway over Atsumu’s shoulder that Suga hadn’t seen at first.  
  
    Atsumu turns. Suga inhales quietly, sucking in air that he hadn’t realized he needed. He’d been holding his breath without knowing it.  
  
    "Follow me…," Atsumu trails off, peeking over his shoulder at Suga, eyes flashing but no longer filled with that odd gleam. Suga realizes belatedly that the other is waiting for his name.  
  
    "Koushi," Suga supplies, surprising himself at the calm of his own voice. Atsumu makes a sound of admission in his throat and then heads for the other door. Suga follows dutifully behind the twin, side-stepping game controllers and wires tangled over the floor and edging past a frosted glass coffee table. There’s a spiral staircase in the far, right-hand corner of the room, twisting up and up and disappearing into a landing. With the dim light, Suga could almost imagine that it never ended.  
  
  _"It’s all about perspective, isn’t it?"_  
  
    Suga wipes the words from his thoughts. He doesn’t even trust his own perspective anymore. The last thing he wants to do is contemplate the complexity of right and wrong, the blurred lines in between justice and cruelty.  
  
    Just because Atsumu is weird doesn’t mean he should let it get to him.  
  
    Kuroo is waiting with Osamu on the other side of the doorframe, leaning against a wall in what appears to be a kitchen. It’s smaller than the living room but, again, the furnishings are nice and new — polished steel and marble countertops.  
  
    Suga spots a first-aid kit lying open on the small kitchen table and finally remembers why he had even agreed to come with Kuroo in the first place.  
  
    Osamu beckons him over silently, pulling out a few rolls of white bandages and a small spray bottle of what Suga assumes is antiseptic. Suga glances down at his hurt hand. The blood has stopped flowing out of the cut but whatever’s spilled has dried uncomfortably over his skin, crusting at his fingertip and leaving a few thin lines of crimson down his arm to his elbow that almost look like claw marks.  
  
    Suga bites his tongue. He tries not to think of lines ripped across the front of a thin, yellow dress.  
  
    "I’ll let you wash it first, if that’s okay." Suga glances up at Osamu at the quiet words. Osamu is the exact opposite of Atsumu, just how Suga had first suspected. There’s no mischief burning in his eyes, just quiet reservation in the depths of gray. Somehow, Suga can imagine that being just as frightening to face if it had been Osamu with him in the living room earlier.  
  
    "Okay," Suga agrees. He sidesteps Kuroo, who’s moved closer, and crosses the tile floor to the sink. The water is blessedly cold after the muggy heat of outside and the itchy warmth of this apartment crammed behind the tattoo parlor. Suga had been beginning to feel a little lightheaded from the heady mix of cloves and hot air.  
  
    Blood runs down the stainless-steel sink, the water sluicing down the drain and washing away the creeping tendrils of red. Suga has a brief, vivid flashback to a memory of Oikawa a year ago — rinsing off a scraped knee at the side of Suga’s house with the watering hose, his blood splashing briefly against concrete before it ran off into the grass and dirt. They had been skateboarding and Oikawa had lost his balance for just a second — it had been just enough to send him tumbling.  
  
    Suga feels like that now. But he feels like he lost his balance a long time ago — he feels like he’s been falling and he’s still trying to brace himself for the impact of concrete.  
  
    "I’m gonna take Kuroo to the shop to get started on this." Atsumu’s voice filters over to Suga and he turns the faucet off and turns, water dripping down his elbow, the cut stinging a little.  
  
    Osamu says something under his breath to Kuroo, but Kuroo only shakes his head and winks at the other twin, Atsumu waiting in the doorway.  
  
    "It’ll be fine," Kuroo says loud enough for Suga to hear, and then the two of them are gone, leaving Osamu and Suga alone.  
  
     _"Great,"_ Suga thinks, moving back to the table, a faint prickle of annoyance running over his skin. _"Way to leave me with a complete stranger, Kuroo. In his own home too."_  
  
    He assumes that "this" means Kuroo’s tattoo and his promised touchup.  
  
    Osamu doesn’t seem to see him for a second, still staring at the doorway that Kuroo and Atsumu have disappeared through. Suga gets the faint impression of disapproval from his face, the stiff set of his shoulders, but it’s gone as soon as Osamu realizes he’s there.  
  
    "Here," he says, holding out a hand for Suga’s. His palm is cool and dry to the touch, his fingers firm but careful.  
  
    Suga winces at the swipe of an antiseptic wipe, the drop of blood that had been welling at his fingertip smeared away, his skin burning around the tear. Osamu sprays whatever’s in the bottle next — a light mist that Suga now thinks could probably be liquid antibiotic — and then quickly and efficiently wraps a strip of gauze up the length of Suga’s index finger, sealing the cut away.  
  
    "Thanks," Suga says, his hand still in the other’s grip.  
  
    It isn’t until Osamu looks at him directly — his steel-gray eyes a little lighter up close, like the fuzziness of the horizon right before dawn begins to approach — that Suga gets an odd sensation of pins and needles, that he suddenly feels as if his skin is _crawling_ with something electric.  
  
    It feels like the hum of lightning in the air on a stormy night. It feels like sparks sputtering and spitting from a flame. It feels like it’s building up to something… bigger.  
  
    It’s so sudden and so shocking that Suga jerks his hand away with a small cry that barely leaves his throat, his heart pounding, a shudder rippling down his spine as his eyes drop to his fingers.  
  
    But his skin is unblemished. The white gauze twines up around his finger. There’s a trace of dried, leftover blood smudged against the knuckle of his middle finger.  
  
    Suga’s head jerks back up to Osamu — who’s putting things away as if he hadn’t noticed the weirdness of Suga’s reaction.  
  
    And the tingling fades. As quick as it had come on, it recedes — like the tide slinking back into the ocean, dragging as much as it can back with it.  
  
    "The antibiotic," Osamu says without looking up, as if he had read Suga’s mind. "It can cause some people to have a weird reaction."  
  
    Suga swallows and then frowns. He tries to calm his breathing. No antibiotic he’s ever had has ever felt like that but he doesn’t say so.  
  
    A few seconds of silence tick past, water dripping from the sink faucet with small, metal pings, the refrigerator humming in the corner.   
  
    Suga looks back down at his hand. Nothing. The skittering of his pulse slows. He feels like an idiot.  
  
    "So what you’re saying is that I’m going to break out in hives in about five minutes, right?" he asks finally, his voice steady as he studies Osamu’s side profile closer for a reason he can’t quite place yet. The other boy is putting his medical kit back in order with a precision that Suga has a faint, prickling suspicion is supposed to hide something else.  
  
    Osamu looks up finally, his bangs falling into his eyes. There’s a small smile on his face. "No," he answers. "It might feel itchy at first but you’ll be okay."  
  
    Suga stays silent and tries not to look as if he’s searching the other’s face too hard. Something niggles at the back of his mind but he can’t pinpoint what it is.  
  
    He wants to confront Osamu. But he can’t do that either.  
  
    All he can do is convince himself that yes, there’s something almost nervous hidden within Osamu’s eyes, something surprised in his smile. All he can do is remember Atsumu’s words and wonder which of the twins frightens him more — which one would have a penchant for distributing mercy and which one buries revenge in their heart.  
  
    As the pieces — some still missing, some broken and missing edges — filter together slowly within Suga’s head, one more question joins the rest.  
  
    He wonders whether Kuroo had brought him here by chance… or on purpose.  
  
  
  
Suga leans against the dirty window of the city bus and bites his tongue.  
  
    Maybe he should’ve said something to Kuroo and Atsumu before leaving. But something — something — about the entire aura surrounding The White Rabbit had set Suga on edge. And it hadn’t just been the twins.  
  
    So he had thanked Osamu for his care and had slipped out the door, edging past the faint glow of light seeping into the living room from yet another door he hadn’t noticed, one that presumably led to the actual tattoo parlor. He had tiptoed past the witch hazel and made it to the black ribbon of street beyond and had walked away without looking back.  
  
    Not for the first time, Suga had regretted not taking Kumiko’s phone with him. He would have to buy a new one, but while walking down the dark, quiet streets, Suga had wished for the familiar weight in his palm — a lifeline to the rest of the world.  
  
    There had been _nothing_ at that stretch of roadside earlier. The night had held nothing but salty, muggy air and then Kuroo and then the twins.  
  
    So why did Suga feel so… _unsettled_?  
  
    Why had he felt so strongly that Osamu had been lying through his teeth in the kitchen? What would the other even have the possibility to lie _about_? Had Suga even felt what he thought he’d felt? Or had it actually been the antibiotic?  
  
    Why had Suga felt as if the very buildings had been closing in on him as he walked? As if the road were going to yawn open any second and swallow him without a sound, a rabbit hole to nowhere and nothing? Why had his heart seemed to itch and burn with the same sensation his skin had the farther he got away?  
  
    But, despite his questions, — despite his fear — Suga had made it to the nearest bus stop that routed past his place. And now here he is, exhausted and rumpled and sitting behind a man that smells very strongly of whiskey and picking at the bandage on his hand as he thinks. The dawn is creeping over San Francisco — fuzzy, pale blue and stirrings of gold that highlight the smudges on the windowpanes of the bus, that turn even the dirtiest seat to something bright and vivid.  
  
    Suga suddenly wishes he had the energy to draw. He wishes he had never gone back to Realities, that instead he was just returning home from a night out with Oikawa, looking forward to sleeping in and waking up to Kumiko’s annoyingly loud music. He wishes everything would feel normal again.  
  
    So he squeezes his eyes shut against the dawn and focuses only on the rumble of the bus beneath him as it carries him farther and farther away from dark eyes of justice and a touch of hellfire.  
  
  
  
The sun hasn’t made it completely over the expanse of the city by the time Suga creeps back into his backyard. Shadows collaborate in the corners and dips of the grass, slink up against the peeling siding and tap at the curtained windows.  
  
    Suga stops for a moment in the dew-covered grass, clutching his bandaged finger to his chest as he hesitates.  
  
    The darkness isn’t so frightening here and the morning air is cool and comforting after the hot stuffiness of the night. Suga takes a few deep breaths of it, listens to the faraway cry of birds and watches the leaves of the neighbor’s lone tree rustle and shift.   
  
    It’s that odd time of morning when it’s still very dark out but the birds are chattering away, chirping and singing through the cool air. When Suga had been little and afraid of the shadows in his room, he had always thought that the birds making noise meant he was finally safe, that he had made it through the worst part of the night even if it was still dark outside. Why would the birds sing if something were wrong?  
  
    Now, in the present, Suga looks at the back of his quiet home and he stands there in his blood-stained jeans and he makes a decision.  
  
    No more wandering off into the night to search for illusions. No more sneaking out to look for hallucinations and no more running into strangers who speak of heaven and hell.  
  
    No more worrying about things no one else can see — things that Suga cannot explain or even fully believe are real.  
  
    From now on, he will focus on Berkeley. He will focus on enjoying the rest of his summer and on his family and on burying his feelings for Oikawa.  
  
    And yet — as the houses creak, as the birds cry, as the faint scent of saltwater and cloves and sweat and blood lingers on Suga’s hair and his clothes and his skin, Suga can’t deny that something cold lingers in his veins. A sliver of something, like a shard of ice, rests in his ribcage and he can’t shake the feeling.  
  
     _"Get a grip,"_ he thinks, suddenly angry. _"What are you doing? Why are you doing this to yourself?"_  
  
    Suga drops his hurt hand. He exhales in frustration, runs a brief touch over his face and tries to quell the irritation that seems to sit in his very bones, that threatens to leave him kneeling in the grass until the sun fully rises.  
  
    He needs sleep more than anything. His body feels as if it’s being held together by string — as if his bones are made of glass and his skin is made of paper and his eyes are sinking back into his head.  
  
    So he takes a step towards home.  
  
    Suga doesn’t hear the rustle of footsteps behind him. He doesn’t see the shadow that consumes his own.   
  
    Not until it’s too late.  
  
    He only feels the hand that covers his mouth, muffling his cry.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry but not sorry for the cliffhanger >:3
> 
> thank you all also for the wonderful support and lovely comments, I hope you guys enjoy this chapter!!
> 
> as always, feel free to check out my blog here: [click me](http://oisugasuga.tumblr.com/)


	7. the call of strange voices

Suga’s first instinct is to thrust his right elbow back as hard as he can into the stomach of his attacker — he had learned that in some mandatory defense class back in high school.  
  
    So he does.  
  
    He makes satisfying contact — contact his teacher would have given him an A+ for, his elbow catching ribs and a soft stomach. He hears the strangled gasp of pain of the person behind him and it’s enough for Suga to twist away and whirl around, his heart thundering in his ears, ready to face his assailant even though he should be sprinting for his house, his fingernails biting into his palms as his hands curl into fists, his brain jumping to his mother’s gardening shears and wondering if he can reach them before -  
  
    "Tooru?!"  
  
    Suga’s voice echoes off of the clapboard walls of the houses around him, hitching high with surprise.  
  
    Oikawa is standing — or rather is bent over in pain — in front of him. Suga recognizes the mussed brown hair under a black cap, the edge of Oikawa’s jaw. He definitely recognizes that old, tattered black sweatshirt that Oikawa’s had for as long as he can remember — it has an unmistakable tear at the hem, stitched back up with silver thread.  
  
    Suga feels his entire body sag as all of the tension and all of the fear and all of the shock bleed from his bones like the sand being pulled back out by the waves. It takes him a moment to regain his voice but it comes back to him quickly, his mind whirling.  
  
    "Tooru, what the fuck?" Suga hisses, running a shaking hand through his hair. He’s not sure whether to feel relieved that it’s Oikawa, angry that his friend snuck up on him like that, or worried about how it looks like tears are beginning to glisten in Oikawa’s eyes when they crack open briefly.  
  
    "Give me - a - second," Oikawa huffs out, holding up a hand. He straightens up slowly, wincing, one hand still holding his ribs.  
  
    Suga watches with his arms wrapped around his middle, shivering, glancing back over his shoulder quickly to make sure no one’s woken up in his house. The windows are still dark so Suga turns back around, his heart still thrumming in his chest as if he just chugged half a gallon of espresso.  
  
    "I tried calling you -," Oikawa starts, finally breathing normally.  
  
    "My phone’s dead, remember?" Suga interrupts. He can hear the irritation in his own voice, but he can’t help it. He’s tired and confused and having Oikawa sneak up on him at the ass-crack of dawn hadn’t helped anything.  
  
    Besides, the last thing Suga wants right now is for Oikawa to be here — after everything that’s happened, the last thing Suga wants to hear about is Daishō or see Oikawa like this, here at his house this late wearing old jeans and a baseball cap, looking for all the world as if he came all of the way across town just because Suga wouldn’t answer his calls.  
  
    It makes Suga’s mind wander and analyze and the last thing he wants right now is that.  
  
    "I tried calling Kumiko’s phone," Oikawa answers after a beat, his eyes flickering across Suga’s face — searching.  
  
    "You _what_?" Suga’s irritation is building, an ugly itch in his chest, a weight in the pit of his stomach. He keeps seeing Oikawa and Daishō, Kuroo and Osamu and Atsumu — their faces flashing and mixing behind his eyelids, strobe lights of anger flashing through his vision. "Why the fuck would you call her so late? You know my mom’s already freaked out."  
  
    He knows what he sounds like — voice harsh and biting. But other worries build up in his head, pushing away the guilt.  
  
     _"Fuck,"_ Suga thinks to himself, looking back over his shoulder again quickly — what if his mom’s awake? What if she’s already found his empty bed?  
  
    "I called her earlier, Sugawara," Oikawa says.  
  
    Suga’s head whips around at the name, all other thoughts vanishing. Oikawa hasn’t called him that in - Suga can’t remember how long it’s been. But he sure as hell recognizes the tightness in Oikawa’s voice, the chill that’s entered his tone. "She said you were sleeping. I came here now because I was -"  
  
    Oikawa breaks off, glancing away for half a second, his throat working. Suga can’t work the words up his throat, the ones to ask Oikawa to finish his sentence. It feels like his tongue is glued to the roof of his mouth, like his blood is simmering.  
  
    The use of his last name only makes the weight in the pit of his stomach heavier.  
  
    For a moment they stand there, staring at each other in the dark.  
  
    Oikawa’s eyes are hard. Suga’s stomach burns with a fire he’s afraid to let loose — he wants to cry suddenly, wants to dig his fingernails into something so hard that they break, his ribcage tightening with each breath. He’s struggling — struggling to keep it together. Atsumu’s voice is in his head.  
  
     _"The monsters below are a lot closer than the clouds above."_  
  
    Crickets chirp. Someone slams a car door down the street. Suga tightens his fingers into fists with the sharp bite of his nails digging into his palms.  
  
    But then it all stops. The feelings seep away. Exhaustion is the only thing Suga can feel and he feels numb with it.  
  
    "Because you were what?" Suga asks quietly. His shoulders sag. His eyes burn. His fists loosen. He feels like curling up on the grass and sleeping right here, feels like sinking to his knees and forgetting everything else.  
  
    For a moment, Suga is sure that Oikawa isn’t going to answer. His friend is rigid, face like stone — Suga has seen Oikawa angry before and he can tell he’s bordering on the edge of it right now. It makes guilt churn in Suga’s stomach, remembering how he had snapped.  
  
    But then the same look of weariness passes over Oikawa’s face, a flicker of dark through his eyes. "I’m worried about you, Koushi," Oikawa says quietly, his eyes passing over Suga’s face, down the length of his body. "Where were you tonight? It’s late and there’s blood on your jeans, I can see it. Probably from your hand."  
  
    Suga can’t help but flinch at how observant Oikawa is, how keen and intuitive he’s always been. It shouldn’t surprise him by now, but it does regardless.  
  
    Oikawa steps closer, one hand circling Suga’s right wrist. His fingers are warm against Suga’s cold skin, and Suga shivers, looks up at Oikawa on instinct, tilting his head back to see him.  
  
    "I cut it earlier," he says, mind whirling to think of an excuse. He doesn’t want to tell Oikawa about Kuroo — about Atsumu or Osamu and the odd feeling in the kitchen or the creepy painting in the living room. He doesn’t want Oikawa to worry any more than he already is. "On a knife in the kitchen. And I was sleeping, like Kumiko said. I just came out for some fresh air, took a short walk."  
  
    Oikawa isn’t looking at him anymore, his gaze fixed down on Suga’s hand. He keeps running soft fingers up and down the back of it — slowly, carefully avoiding the gauze. It sets Suga on fire in a way that is much different from the burn of anger he had been feeling moments before.  
  
    And Suga wants to take that one step closer so badly. Just one to fit into the circle of Oikawa’s arms, to count the number of long, dark eyelashes that feather down over his cheeks, to rest his head against his chest and close his eyes. He wants to ask him why he’s here — why he felt the need to come all of this way at this time of night just because Suga hadn’t been able to answer his calls.  
  
    But he’s not sure what would happen after that.  
  
    And he’s determined to escape this night without anything more to dwell on — determined to get away from Oikawa before his exhaustion breaks down the wall he’s been building up around his feelings.  
  
    But then Oikawa speaks.  
  
    "Can I stay?"  
  
    Suga freezes — his thoughts screech to a frightening halt.  
  
    Stay. Oikawa wants to stay.  
  
    Slowly, Suga looks up at his friend. He’s hyperaware of everything in that moment — the tickle of the grass against his ankles, the heat of Oikawa’s skin against his, the pressure of his touch and the sweet breeze that flutters through the backyard. The beautiful darkness of Oikawa’s eyes, focused on his.  
  
    Suga opens his mouth to speak, to answer, but the words won’t come. He swallows, thinks about how Oikawa hasn’t slept over since he had hooked up with Daishō — which had only been a few months ago but the last time seems years apart, Oikawa curled up in his bed after bingeing crappy movies all night. Suga can just remember what it had felt like to have Oikawa’s arm under his head, what his hair had looked like when they had both finally woken up sometime around lunch.  
  
     _"Don’t do it,"_ his mind whispers. _"Stop torturing yourself."_  
  
    But Suga’s body is tired — his mind is exhausted. He feels the word leaving his lips like the flap of a bird’s wings, unstoppable.  
  
    "Okay."  
  
  
  
Sneaking back into the house is easier than creeping out.  
  
    Oikawa has snuck in before — during nights when Suga had supposed to have been cramming for large exams, when his mom didn’t hesitate to ban any guests despite the fact that Suga has been old enough to make his own decisions for a while now. Or when Oikawa had been determined to get Suga to come out with him — countless late-night bar crawls that had always ended with the two of them eating greasy fast food on the beach or lying drunk on top of the roof of Oikawa’s apartment complex.  
  
    So Oikawa knows the drill. He keeps his sneakers on, follows close behind Suga after he’s locked the back door and placed the spare key back up on top of the fridge. Suga tries not to feel the warmth radiating through Oikawa’s clothes as he sneaks up the stairs behind him, tries not to jump when Oikawa’s hand brushes his on accident.  
  
    He’s dreading being alone with the other, somewhere in the back of his mind, but as soon as they’re both safely inside Suga’s room, the worry disappears. Suga aches. His bed is the best thing he’s seen all night and everything but sleep fades from his mind.  
  
    "There’re spare sweatpants and t-shirts in the -"  
  
    "Bottom drawer," Oikawa finishes quietly before Suga can. Suga’s eyes flick up to the other’s face but Oikawa’s turning away before he can catch any expression, pulling out the dresser drawer in the corner to rummage through Suga’s pajamas.  
  
    Suga focuses on toeing off his own sneakers — leaving them next to Oikawa’s by the bed — and then tugs off the sweatshirt he had worn out, his hair crackling with static electricity.  
  
    Oikawa turns back just then, catches Suga’s eye. He’s holding an old pair of black sweats and one of Suga’s larger t-shirts — one that usually falls to Suga mid-thigh but that fits Oikawa semi-decently.  
  
    Suga pauses, feeling a little ridiculous with his hair all fluffed up and mussed around his head — especially since Oikawa is staring at him for some reason — but then Oikawa mumbles, "I’ll go use the bathroom really quick," and is out the door before Suga can stop him.  
  
     _"He’d better be quiet,"_ Suga thinks tiredly, running his fingers through his hair. Oddly, Oikawa’s gaze still feels like it’s lingering on his shoulders, a faint touch against the back of his neck.  
  
    Suga shakes it off and grabs another pair of sweats from over his desk chair. He changes quickly, leaving his bloodstained jeans in the closet so his mom doesn’t see them. He’ll just have to wash them himself tomorrow.  
  
    After a brief moment of debate, Suga changes his shirt as well. The faint smell of cloves and saltwater and sweat cling to the one he has on and it’s unsettling. He chucks it in with his jeans and shuts the closet door.  
  
    Then he’s pulling back the covers, sliding under them gratefully, nestling down into sheets that smell comfortingly of home. His body sinks into the mattress, every muscle aching, his bones strung together with thread.  
  
     _"I’m never doing this again,"_ Suga tells himself. _"Berkeley — that’s my future."_  
  
    He focuses just on his breathing for a moment. Inhale. Exhale. Inhale. Exhale. Slowly, the rest of his body follows the motion, relaxing completely.  
  
    Suga’s eyelids flutter closed. Sleep tugs at every inch of him. He shifts — rolling over onto his side and stretching — and the movement pulls at the cut along his finger.  
  
    He cracks his eyes open to look at his bandaged hand, something tugging at his tired thoughts. The gauze is plain, simple. The cut still aches, a distant dull throb beneath the firm pull of the bandage.  
  
    And yet Suga can still almost imagine he feels the tingle of electricity over his skin, the crackle and snap of sparks from Osamu. The feeling mixes disconcertingly with the memory of the slow, hot flames that Oikawa’s touch had sent through him.  
  
     _"Go to sleep,"_ he tells himself, dropping his hand and closing his eyes again. _"Neither of them meant anything."_  
  
    Suga is halfway in between dreams and waking when he hears his door open again, the faint click as the lamp is switched off, and then the gentle dip in the bed as Oikawa gets in beside him. He smells spice and black tea — things that Oikawa’s always smelled like — hears the gentle exhale of Oikawa’s breath.  
  
    Suga doesn’t say anything, just keeps his own breathing even and slow and steady. He can’t face being completely awake with Oikawa so close, not tonight. He doesn’t know what he’d do, how he’d ask for comfort, what he’d confess.  
  
    So he lets himself sink farther and farther, thoughts unraveling into the space between reality and illusions.  
  
    And just before he’s completely gone, Suga imagines he feels the warm embrace of arms holding him close — holding him safe.  
  
  
  
Suga dreams.  
  
  
  
     _His bedroom is dark — shadows pool in every corner, cling to every edge. Suga sits up in a bed that has grown cold._  
  
_There’s an odd light filtering through the paper-thin curtains over his windows — it’s emerald, bright, clashes with the black hole that makes up Suga’s bedroom. It throws strange shadows over his walls, across the floor._  
  
_Suga watches them, his brain filled with cobwebs — wisps of thought that escape his reaching fingers._  
  
_And suddenly he can hear the whispers._  
  
_Murmuring, soft voices — they float up through the floorboards, sink down from the ceiling, lace around his wrists and arms like phantom embraces. Loud sometimes, then quiet._  
  
_Suga slips out of bed, shivers as his bare feet touch a floor as cold as frost._  
  
_He feels… lost. There’s an odd chill to his bones, a shard of ice that sits in his heart. A gray place in his chest that clashes with the electric glow coming through his windows._  
  
_The voices tell him to reach for it. They breathe over his skin, drag fingers through his hair, tell him to reach out._  
  
_And Suga listens, holding a single hand out, slender fingers illuminated by verdigris and jade. He reaches with a pale hand for something, for the space beyond the windows — and that’s when he sees it. The mark on the inside of his wrist — bold, black, swirling lines of ink._  
  
_The shape of a bird, a bird with inky feathers thrown outwards in flight, frozen in time._  
  
_Suga stops. He can’t see anything else, can only focus on the marking. It fills his vision with its bold, thick lines, with its stunning intricacy. It’s familiar — the sight of it beats at his ribcage like something long lost coming home._  
  
_He reaches with his other hand to touch it… but as soon as his fingers brush the black lines, his skin is set to fire._  
  
_Suga cries out, drops to his knees on the cold, cold floor, clutches his arm to his chest. Agony tears through him. Sparks and flames lick over his skin — and the voices rise, crescendo all around him, a wave rising and swelling, cresting over his head._  
  
_The cold place near his heart disappears, fades away with the heat coursing through his veins._  
  
_The voices grow — louder and louder and louder._  
  
_The pain blooms in bright colors against the backs of his eyelids, chokes him._  
  
_Suga’s burning from the inside out, his lungs filled with smoke, the taste of ash on his tongue. The agony rips through him like claws._  
  
_"Make it stop," he pleads, the words like shards of glass in his throat. "Please, make it stop."_  
  
_And over it all, over the cacophony and the chaos, one voice reaches his ears as if in answer._  
  
_"Wake up," it says — calm, collected, steady._  
  
_"Koushi, wake up."_  
  
  
  
"Koushi! Koushi, wake up! You’re dreaming!"  
  
    Suga sits bolt upright in bed, thrashing out with his arms, a strangled gasp stuck in his throat as someone’s frantic voice swims through the haze of sleep to his ears. His t-shirt sticks to his back with sweat, his pulse is a roar at his wrists.  
  
    The first thing that swims into view is Oikawa’s face, inches from his — large eyes dark with worry, his mouth parted on a soundless sentence.  
  
    Suga’s broken breathing fills the silence.  
  
    "Kou…," Oikawa starts, trailing off. His voice is husky with sleep, his hair a mussed disarray around a pale face. He doesn’t finish his sentence but the second thing Suga sees is the worry in his eyes, even in the dimness of the bedroom. The clock in the corner reads 5 a.m.  
  
    A few breathless seconds tick by before Suga relaxes at the realization that he’s in his own bed. He tries to catch his breath, fisting his hands into the bedsheets, letting his memories rush back in.  
  
    Oikawa had stayed the night. They’re in Suga’s bedroom. He had been having a nightmare.  
  
    Images from the dream trickle through his head like water through cupped hands, like the afterimages of a flash of lightning, ghostly and pale — metallic green light and voices as soft as the flap of bird wings and something dark and vivid.  
  
    Suga reaches for the details but they drift away, pulled back into the dark recesses of his mind. He lets them go reluctantly, focuses back on Oikawa who he must’ve woken up somehow.  
  
    "I’m okay," Suga breathes out, skin cold with sweat. He’s freezing now, shivers trailing up his spine, his mouth dry with sleep. The unease of having a nightmare still sits on his shoulders, grips the back of his neck with dark talons. The sheets are tangled around him and Oikawa, probably from Suga’s tossing and turning.  
  
    Oikawa doesn’t say anything — but he’s there, close enough that Suga can feel his heat and Suga leans into his chest without thinking about it, his heart still racing at his neck.  
  
    Oikawa stiffens beneath him, Suga feels it — he’s just too tired to care. And too relieved when Oikawa relaxes again, his arms coming up to loop around Suga’s waist, to pull him closer.  
  
    "It’s okay," Oikawa murmurs quietly, his voice reverberating against Suga’s ear against his chest. "It was only a dream." Gentle fingers comb through Suga’s hair then, tentatively at first and then with a stronger resolve when Suga doesn’t pull away.  
  
    Suga squeezes his eyes shut. Exhaustion drips from every piece of his being. _"Just for right now, let me have this,"_ he thinks.  
  
    And so he does. He lets Oikawa coax him back under the covers, saying something about getting more sleep before the sun comes up. He lets him pull him close again, tucking Suga’s head under his chin so that Suga can hear the thud of his heartbeat. He lets himself relax into the embrace, hides his face in the crook of Oikawa’s neck and fists loose fingers in Oikawa’s borrowed t-shirt.  
  
    "Do you want to talk about it?" Oikawa asks quietly once they’re settled. He’s warm and solid, real and comforting. Suga keeps his eyes closed, lets himself grow warm and sleepy again, lets the last dregs of the dream slip away and take refuge in the shadows of his room.  
  
    He shakes his head.  
  
    "No," he says, trying to fight back a little voice in his head even as he answers. "It was just a dream."  
  
    But the words swimming through his thoughts surface anyway — as Oikawa falls silent, as the clock in the corner ticks to the next minute, as outside, somewhere, a bird cries out into the dark, heavy air.  
  
   _"But what if it had been something more?"_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> slkfj sorry it's been so long since an update but I've been super busy with job searching, family visiting, and traveling ｡ﾟ･（>﹏<）･ﾟ｡ hopefully I'll be able to make the next chapter update a little sooner!!
> 
> but I hope you all like this chapter and the OiSuga cuddlesssss
> 
> as always, feel free to leave kudos or comments and you can check out my blog [here](http://oisugasuga.tumblr.com/)!


	8. the color of twilight

The shrill ring of the landline phone on the wall is enough to send Suga’s heart into his throat.  
  
    His fingers jerk — quick, sharp, water spilling over the rim of the glass in his right hand in consequence.  
  
    "Shit." He sets the cup down on the counter, grabs a dishrag to mop up the new mess on the kitchen floor.  
  
    The phone continues its shrill, whiny pitch.  
  
    "Kumiko?" Suga calls over his shoulder. "Can you get that?"  
  
    Silence meets his words. There’s no answer to his request, no sound besides the faint hum of the television in the living room. The phone rings a third time, then a fourth.  
  
    Suga sighs. They had just been getting ready to watch a movie and Kumiko had been sprawled out over the couch two seconds ago —  
  
    The phone stops ringing. There’s the faint sound of Kumiko’s voice in the living room, talking to whoever’s on the other end.  
  
    Suga turns back to his task, refilling his glass when he’s done cleaning. The small window over the sink throws his reflection back at him — dark eyes, hair that gleams like quicksilver under the kitchen lights.  
  
   _"Still so jumpy,"_ his conscious whispers. Suga doesn’t acknowledge it.  
  
    Outside the sun has long since disappeared below the horizon. Shadows curl thick and deep out in the garden and the faint hum of crickets drifts lazily through the thin window glass. Kumiko’s neat stacks of sea glass shine from the windowsill — smooth green, cornflower blue, even a rare crimson-colored stone.  
  
    Suga’s eyes linger on them. He wishes he could reach out and grab the exact colors between his fingertips, wishes he could save them for later, that he could let them bleed out over blank paper.  
  
     _"Just a few more days,"_ his brain reassures him. _"You’ll be hearing back from Berkeley any day now."_  
  
    Suga takes a drink of water, teeth clacking on the rim of the glass.  
  
    He knows he’s right — and yet he can’t stop worrying. He knows the application just officially closed a week ago, that the program doesn’t start until the middle of June and that that’s still almost two weeks away. But his nerves still crawl under his skin every time he opens up his e-mail.  
  
   _"Two weeks,"_ he thinks. That’s how far away that night is now too, just in the opposite direction.  
  
    Suga lets his shoulders relax, takes another sip of water, rubs his tired eyes. He should be grateful that time is moving on, not worrying about his application.  
  
    Two weeks that have finally smudged out into normal days — no nightmares, no waking up at five in the morning shaking with anxiety, no sign of Kuroo or the twins or anything else strange.  
  
    No news from the police about a body lost in the ocean. It still haunts Suga, still makes him jump whenever the landline rings, but there’s been nothing on the nightly news, no headline for a missing woman — and that makes it easier to shove it away, to file it in a different place from the hallucinations… but to push it away nonetheless.  
  
    Suga has moved on. He spends time with Kumiko, helps his mother cook dinner every night, lets Oikawa drag him around town when the other isn’t too busy at his internship with USFCA or spending time with Daishō. Suga’s started going for runs again, has started focusing more on his art than anything else.  
  
    And it’s working. He feels stronger, grounded — he’s getting better at pretending that nothing had ever happened.  
  
    Well… mostly.  
  
    Suga’s free hand drifts unconsciously up to his chest before he stops, fingertips hovering inches above the thin t-shirt he has on.  
  
    It’s there.  
  
    It’s there, deep under his skin. It’s undeniable. A shard, a sliver of _something_.  
  
   _"You’re overthinking,"_ his brain says, cold and cruel.  
  
    But that doesn’t mean Suga can’t feel it — cold and deep in his bones. It feels like someone has taken a knife and carved a piece of him out, right next to his heart — as if they had opened something, a door to somewhere else…  
  
     _"Stop it."_  
  
    Suga puts his glass down suddenly, grips the edge of the countertop with both hands, knuckles turning white.  
  
     _"Stop thinking about it."_  
  
    And with some force, he does. He wipes all thoughts, all questions from his mind. He’s made it this far and nothing has happened — it’s something psychological, something in his head that he _thinks_ he feels but that will disappear with time.  
  
    Suga’s fingers loosen and he straightens, runs a careful hand through his hair, still damp from the shower.  
  
     _"Good,"_ he tells himself. Good — he’s doing good. That’s all that matters.  
  
    The floorboards creak under his socked feet as he meanders back towards the living room. Kumiko is back on the couch when he rounds the corner, long legs thrown over one of the armrests. She looks up when Suga enters the room, shifting to make space on the cushions.  
  
    "Tooru called. _Again_."  
  
    Suga sits down, ignores the barely there skip in his pulse at Kumiko’s words. He also ignores the pointed stare Kumiko is leveling into the side of his head.  
  
    "About what?" he asks, voice nonchalant.  
  
    Kumiko sighs as if she can’t believe Suga is even asking, as if he should already know.  
  
    "The same thing he called about yesterday. You haven’t answered your phone all day," Kumiko answers. Her voice is careful, normal, but even Suga can tell she’s itching to press, to push further. "You know, the new one you got like a week ago?"  
  
    "I’ve been busy," Suga says. It’s not a lie but it still rests heavy on his tongue, the way it always does. He has been busy — he had gone out for a run this morning in the early blue air, had showered, had checked his e-mail more than fifteen times before lunch, had drawn a little this afternoon and had even cooked dinner tonight for him and Kumiko. Their mom wouldn’t be home until early the next morning from a late-night shift at the hospital.  
  
    "Hmm," Kumiko hums. Suga studiously ignores the bait.  
  
    He _has_ been busy. Besides, Oikawa has been busy too — and they had just seen each other two days ago.  
  
    "Well," Kumiko continues into the silence, twining a violet strand of hair around her finger when Suga’s eyes slide over to look at her, "he wants you to meet him at Parallels tomorrow for lunch."  
  
    Suga bites the inside of his cheek.  
  
    Parallels. He hasn’t been back there since school had ended.  
  
    Kuroo is there.  
  
    Kuroo, who Suga had made out with and then ditched. Kuroo, who had found him outside of Realities. Kuroo, who had taken him to The White Rabbit.  
  
    Kuroo, who’s friends with Atsumu and Osamu.  
  
    And Oikawa… Suga doesn’t want to keep avoiding him. He knows Oikawa is worried. He knows he’s only making it worse.  
  
    But ever since Oikawa had stayed over, it’s been… tense.  
  
    Tense, awkward, forced. Suga feels like he’s walking on nails sometimes — talking about Daishō, fending off questions whenever Oikawa brings up Kuroo, trying to act like everything is normal and that he hasn’t been wrecked with nightmares and questions and an odd feeling in his chest for the past couple of weeks.  
  
    Suga had never told Oikawa about that night at The White Rabbit. He’s never even told him that him and Kuroo haven’t spoken since then.  
  
    So now, after several days of trying to act normal, Suga needs space. And he can’t even tell Oikawa why.  
  
    Suga forces the small twinge in his chest away, nods at Kumiko’s words. "Okay, thanks."  
  
    There’s a beat of silence. Suga chances a glance over to see that his sister isn’t looking at him anymore, but that she still has her lower lip tucked between her teeth — thinking.  
  
    "Are you actually going to go?" she asks at the same time that Suga thinks now would be a good time to change the subject.  
  
    Suga sighs. "I don’t know," he answers truthfully — there’s really no point in lying to Kumiko. She’s always had a knack for rooting out her little brother’s deceptions.  
  
    He glances sideways at her again — she’s still staring at the tv, two fingers still tangled in a strand of her hair. Her black nail polish is chipped a little at the tips. Suga sinks a little farther into the cushions, the slight throb of a headache pushing behind his eyes.  
  
    "Okay," she answers.  
  
    Suga blinks.  
  
    "What?" he asks. "No questions?"  
  
    Kumiko lets her head loll against the back of the couch, turns to meet Suga’s gaze. Her eyes are the same honey gold as his and their mother’s — they shine in the blue light from the tv.  
  
    "I know when I won’t get answers," she says and despite the small grin tugging at her lips, her words are serious. It’s Suga’s turn to look away.  
  
    "Should we start the movie?" he asks.  
  
    "Yeah," Kumiko answers, grabbing the remote. "Oh, but Kou?"  
  
    Suga swallows. Ice spreads its glass-tipped nails through his chest, reaches down into his ribcage, leaves a hollow spot.  
  
     _"It’ll go away,"_ his mind tells him.  
  
    "Don’t push Tooru too far away, okay? He deserves more than that," Kumiko says.  
  
    Suga stills.  
  
   _"She’s right,"_ something else in his mind murmurs. _"You know she is."_  
  
    The faintest memory tickles at the back of his mind — of warm hands and a soft voice telling him he’d be okay, telling him it had only been a dream. Suga swallows past the tightness in his throat.  
  
    "Yeah," he says out loud. "I know."  
  
    Kumiko clicks play, settles farther back into the pillows and crosses her legs. Suga bites his tongue, guilt and something else — something sharp and bitter — resting in the pit of his stomach.  
  
    His fingers reach for the brand new, bright and shiny cellphone in his pocket… and then stop.  
  
     _"I’ll text him later,"_ he tells himself.  
  
    "Good," Kumiko answers even as a new surge of guilt rests heavy on Suga’s shoulders.  
  
    And all Suga can do is curl his fingers just the tiniest bit tighter into the hem of his shirt and ignore the little voice that tells him that maybe not _everything_ has completely gone back to normal.  
  
  
  
Suga inhales, long and slow.  
  
    Floor wax and something that almost smells like strawberry chewing gum mix through the air, familiar and oddly comforting.  
  
    He leans back on the hard, wooden bench he’s currently sitting on, shifts his feet a little in the clunky skates he’s just finished lacing up.  
  
    It’s hot in the room, sweat already prickling at the back of Suga’s neck even though all he’s done is pay for his skates and put them on. The old abandoned church-turned-skating rink is filled to the brim tonight with people of all ages — music pulsing through the floorboards, neon lights staining everything they bleed across.  
  
    Suga watches people skid and whirl around out on the rink as he waits, chewing a piece of cinnamon-flavored gum from his stash back home and pinching two fingers in the neckline of his thin t-shirt to fan himself with.  
  
    Church of 8 Wheels hadn’t been _exactly_ what Suga had been planning on suggesting to Oikawa as an alternative to Parallels this morning, but his fingers had texted out the name easily enough.  
  
    Now that they’re here Suga is glad his brain had offered him this choice. It’s crowded and loud enough to avoid talking for long amounts of time and the physical exercise is just what Suga needs after being cooped up in his house all day.  
  
    Besides, Suga loves this place. He’s been coming here since he was little. He remembers learning to skate on that exact same rink in front of him now, how many times he had fallen. He had had his first kiss out there too, with a sweet guy from high school who had moved away soon afterwards.  
  
    Suga’s eyes drift up from the rink as he thinks back.  
  
    It’s always been those stained glass windows though, from the old church, that have always been his favorite part about this place — they always throw such pretty colors out, even at night with the streetlights from outside streaming in.  
  
    Tonight they seem electric. Deep violets, startling ceruleans, ravishing golds — the colors pulse and waver in front of Suga’s eyes. Angels carved in glass stare back at him, their eyes like windows to another world…  
  
    "Hey."  
  
    Suga’s eyes flicker away from the windows at the sound of Oikawa’s voice.  
  
    The other boy is standing next to where Suga’s seated, a pair of pink skates dangling from one hand.  
  
    "That was fast," Suga comments, craning his head around Oikawa’s form to peer towards the bathrooms. "I could’ve sworn there were like fifty people ahead of you."  
  
    Oikawa sits down beside him, his lips curving up at the corners. "Yeah, well when you have my charm and good looks you can afford to skip a few places in line," he responds, voice smug, and Suga, as usual, isn’t really sure whether to believe him or not.  
  
    He hits him instead, his usual soft punch to Oikawa’s arm.  
  
    "Ouchhh, Koushi, unnecessary," comes Oikawa’s usual reply. Suga smiles.  
  
   _"This’ll be good for us,"_ he thinks to himself, flexing his fingers against his thighs. _"It’ll be just like before."_  
  
    He waits while Oikawa bends over to shove his skates on and lace them up, watching his hands untangle the neon fuchsia laces. They kind of match the all-black getup Oikawa had chosen for tonight — dark jeans and a black hoodie, a dark, velvet choker around his pale neck.  
  
    Suga’s eyes wander to the necklace. He knows Oikawa has a collection of them but he usually reserves them for bar nights or house parties.  
  
    Tonight it’s just Suga and he can’t help but admire the way the dark fabric clashes with Oikawa’s skin, how it accentuates the graceful length of his neck.  
  
    He wonders how tight it is, what it would feel like to reach out and trace an edge of it with his finger, if Oikawa would like one around his neck as much as -  
  
    Suga tears his eyes away, blood pooling in his cheeks.  
  
   _"So much for skating being a distraction,"_ a snide little voice in his head says, but Suga ignores it. He just needs to get out on the floor, that’s all. He needs to feel the weight of his body balanced on skates, needs to feel the effortless glide as he flies around the rink, needs to lose himself in the music and lights and people.  
  
    "Ready?" Oikawa asks, finally straightening up. Suga nods gratefully.  
  
    He stands, balancing easily with the extra weight around his ankles. The cinnamon gum leaves a stale aftertaste on his tongue.  
  
    And then Oikawa is following him through the crowd until they’re at the waist-high, swinging door that leads out onto the polished rink. Suga waits for a few kids to trip and giggle out of the ring and then he’s lifting one heavy foot over, gripping the edge until he’s fully inside and balanced on both skates.  
  
    He pushes off the wall, swings his legs in a few short strides — remembers the feeling of gliding effortlessly across the ground — and then twists his body to turn around, braking and watching Oikawa slip out after him.  
  
    The other boy has been here a few times since Suga had met him, courtesy of Suga dragging him around for a few events. He’s surprisingly good at skating too, for someone who apparently hasn’t roller-skated much in his life and for someone with such tall, gangly limbs.  
  
    Not perfect of course, but good.  
  
    Suga grins a little now, watching Oikawa stumble a little at first before he gets his legs beneath him and pushes off from the wall.  
  
    "Lost your touch?" he teases once Oikawa is within hearing range, raising his voice to be heard over the thump of the bass and the ceaseless chatter and laughter around them.  
  
    Oikawa flips him off in return, eyebrows furrowed as he focuses on staying upright. His arms windmill suddenly as he fights for balance, his knees turned inwards.  
  
    Suga stops laughing, reaching out with both hands to grab Oikawa’s arms before the other can tumble to the ground.  
  
    "Pfft," he huffs once Oikawa’s stopped teetering, Suga’s fingers digging into his biceps. "I was just joking but you’ve actually reverted into a newbie."  
  
    "Shut up," Oikawa says half-heartedly, his hands gripping at Suga’s elbows a little looser than Suga had been expecting. "The last time we came was last fall, remember? For the Halloween bash. Otherwise I’d _still_ be able to beat you in a race."  
  
    "Just because you have longer legs," Suga scoffs, but in his mind he does remember last October.  
  
    Oikawa had decided to dress up as some Victorian era gentlemen who had died and come back as a ghost and Suga had gone as a simple skeleton because it had been last minute and Kumiko had offered to paint his face for him.  
  
    But mostly what Suga remembers is the faint stirrings of something that night when he had seen Oikawa in costume, grinning down at him with that familiar smile, a nerdy silk puff tie tucked down into his white club collar shirt.  
  
    Yeah, Suga hadn’t realized that he actually had feelings for the other until a little bit after last winter break, but that night…  
  
    He remembers eating nachos after a night of skating, remembers sharing the food with Oikawa and being happy even though his thighs ached from the workout and sweat had dried sticky and cold against his skin. He remembers Oikawa convincing him to buy a jumbo bag of candy corn at a gas station on the way home. He remembers the two of them finishing it that night during a binge of old horror movies in Oikawa’s apartment on campus while Keiji, Oikawa’s roommate, had snuck handfuls from his position sprawled over the couch behind them. He remembers feeling warm and safe tucked against Oikawa’s side, remembers how carefree and light he had felt there.  
  
    He remembers a lot of things but, looking back now, Suga realizes that it may have been then that the first of his feelings for Oikawa had begun to form.  
  
    Or maybe it had been before that…  
  
    "Yo, earth to Kou." Oikawa’s voice snaps Suga back to the present, back to the pump of music and the pressure of Oikawa’s fingers digging into his arms.  
  
    Suga blinks and then recovers from his memories, flashing a brief smile up at Oikawa.  
  
    "Sorry, didn’t sleep well last night," he lies… and then instantly regrets using that as an excuse. Oikawa frowns, a slight furrow between his brows.  
  
     _"Shit,"_ Suga thinks right before the question he knows is coming leaves Oikawa’s mouth.  
  
    "Are you having more nightmares?"  
  
    People push and pull around them like the tide as Oikawa studies Suga’s face, waiting for an answer. Lights in cotton candy pink and marmalade flash over his dark eyes and strong nose.  
  
    "No," Suga says truthfully this time. "I was just up late watching a movie. No nightmares."  
  
     _"No nightmares,"_ he thinks to himself. _"No more green light or whispering voices or faces in the ocean."_  
  
    Suga meets Oikawa’s eyes, waiting for the other to let the topic drop or maybe ask him what movie he had watched.  
  
    But Oikawa’s gaze shifts away from his instead, the frown disappearing. Shadow covers half of his face. His lips tighten, a twisted curl to his mouth that Suga blinks at.  
  
    Bewilderment floods Suga’s veins — but then Oikawa is turning back to him, eyes bright and clear, all traces of whatever _that_ had just been gone.  
  
    "With a special someone?" he asks slyly, cocking an eyebrow. A wicked-looking grin tilts his lips up. "Tetsu-chan perhaps?"  
  
    Suga blinks at him for the third time tonight. "What?" he asks stupidly.  
  
     _"Tetsu-chan?"_ his brain thinks. _"Since when did Oikawa start calling Tetsurō that? And why -"_  
  
    Oikawa shrugs, fingers flexing against Suga’s elbows as they stand motionless in a sea of roller skaters. "I just assumed. I tried to have a movie night with Suguru a few weeks ago but let’s just say we didn’t get very far."  
  
    Suga’s stomach twists sharply and not so unexpectedly at Oikawa’s words and the look on his friend’s face, suggestion dancing through his eyes, his grin curving up just the barest bit more.  
  
    He shouldn’t be surprised at this point at the mention of Daishō, but maybe it’s because Oikawa hasn’t really talked about the other as much recently. In fact, up until now, it’s been a week or so since Suga’s heard his name and there’s still something about the way Oikawa says it now that’s off, the way Oikawa’s voice edges towards hardness…  
  
    A flash of irritation burns up Suga’s throat regardless. It’s amazing how in just a few seconds they’ve come back to this, how a few words have turned Suga’s casual night out into something uncomfortable.  
  
     _"Did you ever find out more about the so-called Mika?"_ a nasty part of him suddenly wants to ask, the idea flitting through his brain with a whisper touch.  
  
    But Suga swallows it down, guilt surging up to quell the notion. He has no right. He’s not that cruel, no matter what he’s feeling right now, no matter the jealousy slithering cold and dark down his throat.  
  
    Oikawa hasn’t mentioned her since that night at Realities and Suga has never asked — and he’s not going to start now.  
  
    But… if Oikawa insists on bringing up Kuroo, then so be it. Something has broken under Oikawa’s relentless questions and all Suga feels now is the urge to say yes to all of Oikawa’s guesses about his and Kuroo’s so-called "relationship" — even if there isn’t one.  
  
    Suga smiles back, the expression sliding easy onto his face — sweet, coy, the grin practically dripping with suggestion.  
  
    "Actually, yeah," he finds himself saying. "Turns out Tetsu’s big into zombie movies so I invited him over. You know, since Kumiko is a fanatic and has a collection."  
  
    As soon as the lie is out of his mouth, Suga feels an odd mixture of anticipation and regret. Above all he feels something like satisfaction, the emotion curling in the pit of his stomach with a pleasant purr.  
  
     _"You have nothing to feel bad about,"_ a voice in his head whispers. _"Why would you?"_  
  
    He’s right, Suga thinks. There’s nothing to feel guilty over. Oikawa keeps asking so he’s giving him something to chew on — even if it is pathetic to be making up a fake relationship.  
  
    Suga finds himself watching Oikawa’s face closely, searching for the reaction to his answer.  
  
    And there’s surprise there, at first. It’s small, but it’s tangible as Oikawa registers the words, flashing through his eyes alongside the violet-colored lights spilling over the skating rink.  
  
    Then it’s gone. Oikawa smiles, bright and large — his teeth flash in the dark. Suga’s heart does a weird little skip in his chest. Oikawa seems… _different_ tonight.  
  
    There’s something hiding in his eyes, something Suga can sense he’s not telling him. And he seems more on edge, a little sharper than usual. Suga’s seen Oikawa when his pride gets the better of him — arrogant, sharp-tongued.  
  
    Tonight it feels like all of that is aimed towards Suga himself.  
  
    "And what did Kumiko think about that?" Oikawa asks next.  
  
    Suga doesn’t answer at first, still staring at Oikawa’s face. He admits it to himself — he’s looking for that look again, the one from before, from the beach. The one that had been so _new_ on Oikawa’s face — raw and vulnerable, open and asking.  
  
    He’s thought of that expression more times than he’d like to admit. He’s thought of that moment more times than he can count, that one where they had both been frozen in time, Oikawa so close.  
  
    But… there’s nothing.  
  
    Oikawa is still grinning, a leer that promises Suga of questions to come, questions about Kuroo and their "movie night". But that’s it — there is no uncertainty on his face, no forced air to the smile he’s aiming straight at Suga.  
  
    Suga swallows down the bitterness on his tongue.  
  
    "She was out," Suga makes up. Another lie.  
  
    "How convenient," Oikawa coos, suddenly moving forward so that Suga rolls backwards, the two of them still holding onto each other. "The house all to yourselves then?"  
  
    Suga tilts his chin back haughtily, arrogant. The fact that Oikawa’s prying so boldly — even if it’s into something Suga made up — sends shivers of irritation through Suga’s stomach.  
  
    No, that’s not right. It’s not the fact that Oikawa’s asking questions… it’s how he’s coming across, as if Suga is hiding some dirty little secret.  
  
    "Yeah," Suga drawls, blowing and snapping a bubble with his gum. "My mom worked the night shift and Kumiko stayed over at Alisa’s, so it worked out." He flashes an innocent smile up at Oikawa then, peering up through his eyelashes.  
  
    The tips of Oikawa’s grin turn sharper in return, more pronounced. He continues to skate with Suga in front of him, suddenly very good at keeping his balance. His eyes are dark and the smell of his cologne washes over Suga, mixes with cinnamon and floor wax.  
  
    "I bet Kuroo didn’t object to staying the night at your place either, did he? Not considering the way Suguru told me you guys were all over each other at the club that night," he says lazily, words loud to Suga’s ears even over the cacophony of the skate rink.  
  
    The way Oikawa says them — chilled and lofty — sends a hot flush of shame over Suga’s skin… but it’s nothing compared to the way the next sentence from his mouth makes Suga feel. "Moving a little too fast, don’t you think Kou?"  
  
    Suga lets go of him. Something ice-cold washes through the pit of his stomach, wells up his throat.  
  
    Oikawa stops, fingers dropping from Suga’s elbows. He stands easily and his face is oddly defiant, something hot burning in his eyes, clashing with the frigidness Suga suddenly feels.  
  
    They stand still again, facing each other in the middle of the rink, candy-colored lights bleeding out over their skin.  
  
    "Not as fast as you were to get into bed with Suguru."  
  
    The words drop from Suga’s mouth like a train hurtling down tracks at full speed — unstoppable, heavy, screeching metal against metal.  
  
    Silence hits the two of them with all of the force of that train while the rest of the world carries on around them like a carousel of color and light and music.  
  
    The look on Oikawa’s face — shock, disbelief — cuts into Suga’s chest. Emptiness yawns a giant, gaping mouth under his ribcage. His fingertips feel numb.  
  
    And a sliver of ice right there, next to his heart, digs in a little deeper.  
  
    "Tooru -," Suga starts, voice barely above a whisper, but the words don’t come. They lodge in his throat, stick there as if two hands are suddenly around his throat, squeezing.  
  
    Shame, guilt, anger, fear — all of it sloshes nauseatingly in the pit of Suga’s stomach. Suddenly the room is too hot. The music is too loud, there are too many people.  
  
    Oikawa’s looking at him as if Suga is a stranger.  
  
    And, despite the heat, a chill is spreading through Suga’s body. It crawls like something living over his skin. It waits, teetering on the edge of something, like a string about to snap.  
  
    Unconsciously, Suga’s fingers drift up to clutch at his chest, tangling in the front of his t-shirt.  
  
    That small movement seems to break Oikawa from his stillness. His expression morphs, changes, twists and suddenly Suga is having a flashback to two weeks ago, standing in his mother’s garden while Oikawa’s eyes turned cold.  
  
    Suga watches as Oikawa’s mouth opens, as he hesitates before closing it. He watches as Oikawa’s eyes shutter off, as his lip curls, as hurt and anger flash in quick succession over his face. And then he watches Oikawa shake his head, watches as the other turns around, as he disappears into the crowd, leaving Suga behind.  
  
    Suga stands still and watches and the space in his chest holds his hand the entire time.  
  
  
  
Oikawa is there when Suga steps foot out of the church, leaned up against one of the walls with his head tilted up towards the night sky.  
  
    For a flash of a moment, Suga considers pretending that he hadn’t seen him. His legs itch to walk the other direction but then the feeling passes, caught away on a faint, summer wind.  
  
    His teeth feel sticky and the slightly-sickening spice of cinnamon lingers as he shoves both hands down into his pullover and moves the few steps it takes to stand in front of Oikawa.  
  
    Oikawa doesn’t look at him at first. Suga waits. He knows that Oikawa is aware of him — it’s there in the subtle shift of his throat as he swallows, in the tiniest flex of his fingers where he has his arms crossed over his chest.  
  
    The faint, muffled thump of music from inside intensifies suddenly, grows crystal clear for a few seconds as the front doors swing open to let more people out. A car horn beeps sharply down the road and something — a bat maybe — swoops past one of the parking lot streetlights.  
  
    And finally Oikawa looks down.  
  
    Out here, in the flickering streetlights and watery colors patterning the cracked asphalt, Suga sees it again.  
  
    That look.  
  
    He had been expecting anger. He had been expecting guilt and an apology. After all, they had both crossed some kind of line inside.  
  
    But it’s that look again, above everything else. It’s like Oikawa is begging to ask him something but he doesn’t know where to start or he’s afraid to hear the answer.  
  
    If Suga could paint it, he thinks, he’d use lilac and lavender, lapis and something the color of twilight.  
  
   _"What’s wrong?"_  
  
    The question yanks at Suga’s heartstrings, begs to be asked, bubbling up in his throat… and the doors yawn open again, another burst of color and sound followed by the faint tang of cigarette smoke.  
  
    Curious eyes from the latest group of laughing teenagers move and settle on Oikawa and Suga and Suga fidgets with the keys to Kumiko’s old Jeep Wrangler before jerking his head towards where it’s parked.  
  
    "Come on," he says and Oikawa follows without question, silent as Suga unlocks the doors of the Jeep and crawls in the driver’s seat.  
  
    The silence is even more suffocating once Oikawa shuts the passenger side door, but at least here they can talk in private.  
  
    Suga studies the other’s face in the fuzzy, yellow glow of the streetlights outside, digs his nails into the tattered upholstery of the seat beneath him, and then bites his lip and stares out the windshield, lost for words.  
  
    Kumiko has hung a flower-shaped air freshener from the rearview mirror but the scent has long since faded. Now the car smells like an odd mix of strawberry pop-tarts and the ocean — two of Kumiko’s guilty pleasures.  
  
    And for a second Suga wishes that he could sink into the faded seats and disappear with nothing but the nostalgic glow of the lampposts and the faded underlying smell of jasmine to comfort him for a short moment — just until he felt like himself again.  
  
    Just until this — with Oikawa — felt normal again.  
  
    Just until the ice melted into the hot, salty night air and left his heart the way it used to be.  
  
    Suga looks at Oikawa then, caught in the middle of those thoughts, and waits for his friend to look at him, waits for those familiar brown eyes to ground him again.  
  
    Oikawa’s already looking at him — eyes dark and vulnerable in the dimness of the car, an odd expression on his face, lower lip tucked between his teeth — and the silence stretches and builds, something painful aching deep in Suga’s stomach until he can’t take it anymore.  
  
    "I -," he begins, willing to speak first, willing to break whatever unspoken thing has been lying between them, willing to just _end_ this already -  
  
    And Oikawa kisses him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> oops? on another note, thank you guys so much for your support<33
> 
> [click here for more OiSuga content](http://oisugasuga.tumblr.com/)


	9. the touch of a cold hand against bare ribs

Hot and dizzying, Oikawa’s mouth presses firmly to Suga’s.

 

    One huge tremor of shock sweeps through Suga’s core, destroying everything in its path. All of his thoughts train-wreck with each other. All of his words, whatever he had been feeling moments ago… it all goes up in fire and smoke.

 

    And then his body goes on autopilot. 

 

    Here, trapped in this small space with Oikawa’s hands somehow tangled in his hair and his own anxiety beating quick and sharp at his ribcage — here with angel eyes that burn looking on from the windows of the church — Suga’s entire world of right and wrong flips upside down.

 

    It’s wrong — he knows that much in the back of his shock-addled brain. Oikawa is _Daishō’s_.

 

    But all of it — the fear, the sharp words from inside, the stress — everything collides.

 

    Suga kisses Oikawa back.

 

    He’s been waiting for this, he realizes, somewhere in the back of his fog-addled brain. He’s been waiting, _yearning_ , for this — for Oikawa to suck in a breath of surprise at Suga’s reciprocation and then get over his shock and tangle his fingers harder in Suga’s hair, kiss him deeper.

 

    He doesn’t know what they’re doing, what this means, but Oikawa doesn’t stop to ask questions and neither does Suga.

 

    They crash into each other like the waves on the beach and all Suga knows is that Oikawa smells like cedarwood, that he’s gripping Suga tighter, closer, that the wet heat of his tongue is suddenly pushing past Suga’s lips and _God_ -

 

    A sharp rap to one of the car windows ricochets through the air like a gunshot.

 

    Suga jerks in tandem with Oikawa, the two of them separating, and for a wild second, Suga doesn’t know what had caused the distraction. He’s punch-drunk on Oikawa’s kisses, on his taste and touch, on the darkness of desire he sees reflected back at him in Oikawa’s own eyes, the other boy’s pupils blown wide, his cheeks flushed with emotion.

 

    "What -" Suga sees the face behind Oikawa’s shoulder before his friend can finish the word. 

 

    His heart drops to his shoes.

 

    Kuroo’s smile is what can only be described as a leer. He leans against the side of the car and it’s painfully obvious that he’s seen everything.

 

    The blood drains from Oikawa’s face when he sees who it is.

 

_"Daishō,"_ Suga thinks with a kind of sickening twist to his stomach. The weight of what they’ve just done — of what _he’s_ just done — is beginning to swirl nauseatingly through him. It’s like having a bucket of ice-cold water thrown over his head.

 

    By the look on Oikawa’s stricken face, the same is happening to him. Or maybe he’s remembering what Suga himself has forgotten, given the fact that it’s a bald-faced lie — that Suga and Kuroo are seeing each other.

 

    "Tooru -" Suga’s voice is shaky to his own ears but Oikawa swings towards it like a drowning man to the flash of a lighthouse.

 

    "Kou -," he starts, eyes wide, but there’s another rap on the window.

 

    Oikawa snaps back around, irritation flashing sharp over his face, lips twisting as if he’s going to tell Kuroo off, but then it vanishes. His shoulders sag and when he looks back at Suga, he doesn’t really look at him, just focuses on an empty space between Suga’s shoulder and his right ear.

 

    "I’ll tell him the truth," he says, fingers clenching and unclenching in his lap and it takes Suga a moment to realize that Oikawa is talking about Kuroo. "I’m so sorry, Kou-"

 

    His voice seems to get caught on the name and he clears his throat, tries again. "I’m sorry, I never should’ve… I’ll talk to Tetsurō."

 

    Suga is shaking his head before Oikawa can finish, an odd mix of shame and hurt and wanting all flushing hot and bright over his face. "You don’t have to say -"

 

    But he stops. What can he say?

 

    Even if he tells Oikawa the truth about Kuroo, even if he tells him that Kuroo doesn’t matter or care in this situation, what about Daishō?

 

    Again, that overwhelming wave of nausea crests over Suga’s head.

 

    "I’ll talk to him," he hears himself saying, as if from a great distance. "It’s okay."

 

_"It’s not okay,"_ his brain murmurs. _"Nothing is okay."_

 

    But Suga merely raises his eyes to look at Oikawa just in time to see pain and guilt sweep over the other’s features and then Oikawa nods, quick and jerky. Three words leave his mouth, quiet in the hushed car.

 

    "I’ll text you." And then he’s shoving out of the passenger side door, Kuroo jumping back to avoid him, and disappearing into the hot night air.

 

    Suga nearly scrambles to follow him, his heart thudding hard in his ears. Every inch of him is telling him that he has to tell him that he’s lied, he has to tell him that -

 

    But there’s no point. There’s nothing he can say. Not when, ultimately, it boils down to one ugly truth.

 

    Suga slumps back into his seat. He licks chapped lips. Shock still tingles up and down his skin, coupled with the bitter truth and the guilt that comes with it like a package deal.

 

    How the fuck is he supposed to feel right now?

 

    Oikawa had kissed _him_. That thought alone is enough to make the blood rush through his ears, make him dizzy all over again. His fingers reach up to press lightly against his lips, remembering the weight of the kiss, the -

 

    A long, slow whistle breaks through Suga’s thoughts.

 

    Suga narrows his eyes at Kuroo, heart pounding anew against his ribs.

 

    "What are you doing here?" The words come out cold and clear-cut, like glass, but he can’t help it. He’d nearly forgotten Kuroo standing there — lost in his daze and watching Oikawa melt away into the dark outside the puddle of streetlights — but now dread is beginning to overlay everything else, sliding cold and sticky down Suga’s throat.

 

_"Just coincidence,"_ the logical part of his brain mutters… but Kuroo’s expression now makes that thought seem like a guess that is far-off from the mark.

 

    Suga jerks as Kuroo slides into the empty space left by Oikawa.

 

    "Hey -," he starts, but Kuroo is all work no play, the leer and the sickening pity in his eyes having faded with Suga’s question, as if his words had jolted something that Kuroo had forgotten about back up to the surface. He shuts the door, places a long, tanned finger up to his lips in a hushing motion that sends Suga’s pulse ricocheting at his wrists with adrenaline.

 

    "I’m going to ask the questions from here on out," Kuroo says. Suga’s lip curls despite his confusion, despite his fear, his irritation blooming faster in his stomach.

 

_"Stay calm,"_ his mind murmurs. _"It’s just Tetsu."_ Regardless, something — something in Kuroo’s eyes or the flickering bits of tension Suga can feel radiating off of the other boy now — sets Suga’s teeth on edge, has his hand edging towards the door handle on his side, fingers curling over it.

 

    "Tetsurō, I don’t know what this is or what the fuck you’re talking about, but you need to get out of my car now."

 

    Kuroo doesn’t move. He just looks at Suga with something scarily close to accusation and maybe even hope, although Suga isn’t sure how the two mix. The streetlights outside throw his face into a sullen, sickly yellow contrast, make the skin stretched over his prominent cheekbones look too thin — like it would break and crumble to dust if Suga were to trace a finger over it.

 

    But Suga doesn’t have time to linger on the thought. 

 

    He doesn’t have time to brace himself.

 

    "You’re _fucking_ with me." 

 

    The words hiss out of Kuroo’s mouth, like a steam whistle, vicious and sudden — and then the rest seems to just spill out, water crashing over sand, angry, Kuroo’s voice rising and whipping into the air. "Did you really think we wouldn’t find out? You’re not that stupid, I know you aren’t. You let Osamu touch you and you knew what he is, so you had to have known he’d feel it. So what was it then? A little peek into how the San Francisco Institute is doing without us knowing we were being watched? And then you wanted to throw it in our faces before you left? Is that what the Conclave’s resorted to now? Or maybe -"

 

    Kuroo breaks off suddenly, as if someone has reached in and squeezed a tight fist around his vocal cords — most likely at the expression on Suga’s face.

 

    Suga can feel it himself — the crumple of his mouth and the widening of his eyes, saucer-like in what must be a face pale with the shock of everything that’s happened in the past ten minutes. And his blatant surprise throws Kuroo off track for a moment, the other boy’s mouth snapping shut as his eyes dart across Suga’s face.

 

    Confusion — no, _bewilderment_ floods Suga’s limbs, sucking and pulling at the blue-green veins at his wrists. His heart thumps uneasily in his chest, sweat prickles across the back of his neck.

 

    Kuroo’s words — words that make no sense, words like "institute" and "conclave" — are crazy. His voice, wrongfully accusing, stings against Suga’s skin like the spray of salt on the boardwalk.

 

    And yet… some of it fits perfectly. 

 

    Even as Suga’s brain rejects the sentences, even as he stares blankly at Kuroo, some of it clicks into place like puzzle pieces in some horrible game. Kuroo’s words, Osamu’s name, the phrase "touch you" and time is shifting, turning and Suga’s nightmares from before are raising their ugly heads once more, sliding cold and wet over his skin and through his hair as if they had never left in the first place.

 

    And then something whispers in his ear — _"Maybe you were right about Osamu, Atsumu, The White Rabbit, the rips in the shadows and the rose-colored door. Maybe you were right."_

 

    Suddenly, Kuroo’s face isn’t so familiar anymore. Suddenly, the other boy’s eyes are eerily dark, his pupils expanding and blowing up to crush his irises into pale, cold slivers of gold. Suddenly, Suga is wondering just _who_ Kuroo actually is.

 

    Suddenly, Suga doesn’t want to be here anymore.

 

    Kuroo reaches for him, slow-motion like, lips shaping around some word Suga doesn’t hear over the lingering ringing of Kuroo’s outburst in his ears. The interior of the car seems to shrink, withering in on itself, pushing pushing pushing, suffocating and the shadows from outside bleeding in, seeping under the glass windows, under the cracks around the doors, _drowning_ …

 

    Suga rips the driver’s side handle open, all but throws himself out onto the pavement outside, stumbling before he regains his footing.

 

    "Koushi!"

 

    But his name is lost on the wind, lost to Suga’s ears. Above his head, some bird or bat screeches, screaming in the dark outside of the streetlights. And in his ribcage, Suga’s heart _squeezes_ and Suga imagines it bursting, imagines it spraying blood everywhere as his fear finally overwhelms him, imagines the blood surging up his throat to cover his teeth and choke him like the darkness in the car… like the waves over the dead woman’s head.

 

    He runs.

 

 

 

_"No. No. No, no, no, no, nononononono."_

 

    The word repeats itself. It spirals out of control inside Suga’s mind and crawls up his throat, beating desperate wings against his gasping lips.

 

    Somewhere, in some calm and quiet part of his head, Suga knows that he should stop running.

 

    But his body moves forward, thrusting him through the unfamiliar terrain. The impact of his sneakers over hard ground sends shockwaves up through his legs, shivering up his bones and making his teeth clack together painfully, catching the tip of his tongue once so that the iron tang of blood mixes with the bile in his throat.

 

    He can’t shake the rest of it, the parts of him that are telling him to keep moving, that are urging him onward because if he stops… if he stops, Kuroo will catch up to him and God only knows what’s happening, what the other boy has just revealed or hasn’t revealed or if he’s just on drugs, something like LSD or molly.

 

    It’s Kuroo’s words from before, though, that chill Suga’s blood, that have him running faster despite the burning in his lungs.

 

_"It’s not possible,"_ comes over the static in his head, like a ghost of a voice over a disconnected line. _"It’s not real. Nothing you saw was real. It’s not related to Kuroo, not related to whatever he just said or to the twins or to any of it. Two weeks and you had no nightmares. Two weeks and this was all behind you."_

 

    Two weeks and now Suga is sprinting past quiet, residential houses, avoiding trees that line the empty roads and skidding past a stretch of construction, heart slamming into his chest.

 

    Two weeks and he’s somehow back to this. Running away.

 

    He’s turned around, he knows it already. He doesn’t recognize these streets. All he keeps seeing are the flashes of dark windows from the houses, like eyes watching him run, watching him panic. Eyes that remind him of that night at The White Rabbit — that remind him of the sizzling heat from Osamu’s fingertips.

 

_"It’s not_ real _."_ And in that moment, Suga thinks the thought so forcibly, so _viciously_ , that his feet stutter to a screeching halt.

 

    He stands, half-bent over with the weight of his run, panting in short, sharp bursts. Whirling around, Suga scans the street behind him but it’s empty, no sign of Kuroo. His chest rises and falls rapidly, sweat pooling at the base of his spine, and his legs ache, muscles twitching under his skin.

 

_"Where is he? Where’d he go? Is he still following me? What did he mean?"_

 

    Suga runs a shaking hand through his hair, bangs damp now from the muggy heat and his sprint. He forces himself to take one step, two steps, three steps back into a cluster of shadows clinging to the line of buildings on this side of the road, forces himself to stop and breathe.

 

_"He must think I’m crazy,"_ he can’t help but think, but no, that’s wrong… Kuroo is the one who had showed up out of nowhere, as if he had _known_ where Suga would be. Kuroo is the one who had been seeking Suga out even though they hadn’t talked in weeks, the one who had spewed nonsense, sentences that made no sense.

 

    The adrenaline buzzing over Suga’s skin slows, trickling down to a faint hum. He sinks to the ground, knees drawn up to his chest, back pushing up against cold brick.

 

_"What had he said? Something about San Francisco, something about a conclave? Or a council? And definitely something about Osamu, about letting him touch me."_

 

    Suga pushes his fingers into his forehead, digs the tips of them into his skull, squeezes his eyes shut and tries to think over the beating in his ears. Not about what Kuroo had said, because he can’t think about that now, but about where he should go from here.

 

    He could retrace his steps back to Kumiko’s car, but it’ll take time. He hadn’t been paying attention to where he had been running, and as Suga pats his pockets, his heart sinks because he must’ve left his phone somewhere in the vehicle — it’s not on him.

 

    Going back to the car also means possibly running into Kuroo again. He had thought that Kuroo had given chase at first, but now, with him nowhere to be seen, he’s either lost him or Kuroo has turned around and decided to use a different tactic — waiting until Suga comes back to get his things.

 

    The other option is to grab some form of public transportation home. He’s too far away to walk, but there’s a few crumpled bills in his pullover pocket and it’s enough for the bus at least.

 

    The problem with that idea is that Kumiko will murder him if he shows up without her beloved Wrangler and his mom will ask questions. Questions that Suga won’t be able to answer. Questions that he _can’t_ answer.

 

    Besides, they’ll have to come get it eventually and Suga has a prickling premonition that Kuroo won’t hesitate to keep an eye on it until they do.

 

    "Fuck." The word drops from Suga’s lips softly.

 

    He grinds the heels of his hands into his eyes until he sees spots. " _Fuck_ ," he can’t help but curse again, louder this time.

 

    He’s tired. He’s hot and drained, emotionally. And over it all, sticky and damp against his skin, he’s _frightened_.

 

    His mind can’t seem to decide between settling on Kuroo’s face in the car, anger twisting at his lips and bleeding dark through his eyes, or Oikawa’s, to the guilt swimming in a deep brown gaze and the heat of a searching mouth on his.

 

    Suddenly, Suga finds it kind of funny — in a twisted kind of way.

 

    Kumiko had been so adamant about him going out. She had insisted that Suga needed to get some fresh air. More importantly, she had said, Suga needed to see Oikawa and stop leaving him on read.

 

    And now look.

 

    Oikawa had kissed him. Oikawa had purposefully _kissed_ him in her car. And if that weren’t bad enough, Kuroo Tetsurō hadn’t just happened to be in the same place as them… no, he had also purposefully shown up. He had shown up and had shoved reality down both of their throats and then he’d gone off and accused Suga of, of…

 

_"You let Osamu touch you and you knew what he is, so you had to have known he’d feel it."_

 

    Suga’s eyes fly open, something Kuroo had said suddenly turning over in his head. Memories flash behind it in short, sharp bursts — images drifting to the surface, watery and then clear.

 

_"You let Osamu touch you…"_ Cool, dry fingers against his, the smell of antiseptic.

 

_"And you knew what he is…"_ Steel-gray eyes on Suga’s face, light like the fuzziness of the horizon right before dawn.

 

_"So you had to have known he’d feel it…"_ The hum of lightning on a stormy night, sparks sputtering and spitting from a flame. _Something_ building over Suga’s skin… a thread ready to snap.

 

_"The antibiotic. It can cause some people to have a weird reaction."_ Osamu’s voice now, in his ears.

 

    Suga scrabbles to his feet. His tongue feels too large for his mouth suddenly, his chest is tightening, the bones bending and curving and seeking to move inwards towards his heart, threatening to crush it because he can _feel_ it stronger than before now.

 

    As if summoned by just the memory of that night at The White Rabbit, the ice-cold place in his chest flares. 

 

    It’s been waiting, Suga thinks feverishly, irrationally. Waiting for this moment, waiting for someone else to confirm what Suga had forced himself to believe he had only imagined the night Osamu touched him.

 

    There’s no other explanation. There can’t be any other explanation. Why else would Kuroo have said what he had? Why else would he have come to find him?

 

    Why else would Suga still be feeling _this_ , this thing that’s buried under his chest now like the touch of a cold hand pushed against his bare ribs?

 

    Hatred suddenly pulses in tandem with the frigid nothing pulsing through Suga’s veins. Hatred towards Kuroo, spite and anger, because he’s done something awful.

 

    He’s made all of this real.

 

    Something dark flashes in the corner of Suga’s vision, only yards down the road he’s on, and every thought in his head shatters, gone.

 

_Kuroo_. He’s found him.

 

    Suga takes off, sneakers pounding against the ground, arms working to propel himself faster. He doesn’t care that his lungs are aching, that his knees feel every stumble or that he still doesn’t know where he’s going.

 

    This is his chance.

 

    He looks around furiously, desperately. If he can figure out which way to go, maybe he can circle back to the church, get to the car before Kuroo catches up to him. Make it home where he can shut and lock his bedroom door, crawl under his bedcovers and sew his eyes shut, stuff cotton in his ears, tape his lips closed and pretend that none of this ever happened.

 

_"Maybe you should listen to him."_ The voice is small and insignificant and still it reverberates above the rest of Suga’s broken thoughts. He pushes it away. He can’t listen to Kuroo. He _can’t_.

 

    Listening to Kuroo means that Suga believes what’s been happening, even if it’s just the smallest flicker, just the tiniest waver towards the impossible.

 

    And believing… believing means that there’s a possibility, no matter how small or narrow, that those shadows on the side of the road had been real — that the bitter taste of blood and fear that had blown from them are real. That whatever lies beyond could exist… touchable, tangible, dangerous.

 

    Because that’s what Suga had felt that night outside of Realities — danger, pure and simple.

 

    And all Suga can keep seeing in some dark and cold room buried deep below in his head is that woman.

 

    The woman in the yellow dress with fish for eyes and a gaping, loose, rotting mouth and her guts ripped open.

 

    Her face looms up out of the dark then at Suga, a hallucination born and bred from his fear and from the air burning in his lungs as he runs, and his heart twists sickeningly in his chest, nausea sloshes in his stomach, his steps falter, a narrow side street coming into view as he makes a sharp turn around a corner, veering off the main road like some kind of animal being _hunted_ -

 

    The person that he collides with comes from nowhere and nothing.

 

    Suga’s stomach drops fully from beneath him as if he’s on a roller coaster, a yelp bursts from between his lips.

 

    They hit with not just the force of one running person, but two, a sickening crash of skin and bones and crushing pain, and just before Suga loses his footing and falls sideways, unable to stop himself, he thinks he feels the soft brush of long hair against his cheek, feather-light amidst the hardness of everything else.

 

    He thinks he sees a flash of yellow.

 

_"Oh God."_

 

    And as he falls — sinking down like the angels from heaven, like the woman below the water — Suga just has time to think one more thing before he hits hard, unforgiving ground, before the side of his head cracks violently against concrete.

 

    One last thing to think before the shadows finally bleed over his vision to claim him, to close over his head and drown him into oblivion.

 

_"Oh God. She’s here."_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> poor Suga, I'm putting my favorite boi through so much... but as always thank you all for reading and leaving feedback, I love hearing what you all think ♥︎
> 
> click on the kitty to visit my blog!! [(^._.^)ﾉ](http://oisugasuga.tumblr.com/)


	10. paper-thin lungs

Cold. Dark. Soft.

 

    Suga’s fingers rest against something that feels like crushed velvet. His body hurts. His head… his head feels too heavy.

 

    He cracks his eyes open but even that feels difficult to do, like there are weights on each eyelid. Groaning, Suga forces them open… and then all he can see is dark.

 

    Pitch-black, suffocating, deep and thick and heavy. Dark, dark, dark.

 

    Drawing in a sharp breath, Suga feels around him. 

 

    Where is he? What happened? What is he lying on? He’s on his back, stretched out along a surface.

 

    Fragments of memory begin to trickle back like water through cupped hands and Suga remembers — he remembers running, remembers Kuroo, remembers hitting something and then nothing. Darkness.

 

    Heart beating hard and heavy in his chest, Suga grasps around him, struggling to stay calm.

 

    Where _is_ he?

 

    Where’s Kuroo?

 

    There are blankets or some kind of throw around him. He can feel the fabric, the crushed velvet under his fingertips, can feel something harder underneath… a mattress.

 

    He’s on a bed.

 

_"Oh God. What the fuck - what - where - Kuroo -"_

 

    Suga struggles upwards quickly, groaning again. His head throbs, sharp pain shooting quick and strong back through his eye sockets. One spot in particular hurts more than the rest and when Suga lifts a shaking hand to feel, he can feel something dried and crusted in his hair… blood he guesses. He had hit his head on concrete.

 

    And underneath his hair, taped to where he must’ve cracked his skull open, there’s a rough square of what feels like some kind of gauze, some kind of padding under that.

 

_A flash of yellow._

 

    Someone… someone had come around that corner. Someone in yellow. Kuroo had been behind him.

 

_"Breathe."_ Suga stills with great effort. Every piece of him is begging him, screaming at him, to run. But his brain is working harder, keeping him quiet — keeping him collected even though it feels like his terror is barely contained, held together by a very thin string.

 

    A string stretched so taught, so thin, Suga imagines he could slice his neck open on it.

 

    Suga wants to run so badly it’s tangible, a bitter iron bloom on his tongue where his teeth are digging in.

 

_"But run where?"_ a logical voice in the back of his head asks. _"You can’t see. You’re hurt. You don’t know where anyone is. They could be waiting for you, anywhere."_

 

    The breath saws in and out of Suga’s lungs. He feels like he’s run a great distance and at the same time it hurts to keep inhaling and exhaling. His lungs feel paper-thin — fluttering, flapping things trying to escape.

 

    And it’s cold in here, so different from the summer heat. Suga is shivering he realizes, from more than just fear. There are goosebumps over any exposed skin and his fingers are numb and stiff.

 

    Shakily, he moves slowly. He draws his legs up to his chest, making himself smaller. He feels in the pockets of the clothes he has on, searching for his phone, for his keys. He doesn’t even remember if he had left the keys to Kumiko’s Jeep in the car or if he’d had them on him while running.

 

    But there’s nothing. No phone. No keys.

 

    So he feels around to the sides of the mattress until the fingers of his right hand hit something hard and smooth. Suga’s heart leaps into his throat before he realizes it’s a piece of furniture.

 

_"A nightstand? A desk?"_

 

    Farther and farther he reaches, fingertips trailing over a smooth, flat surface. He jerks when he knocks something light and plastic over, listening with his pulse roaring in his ears as it topples over with a clatter. There’s the sound of it rolling and then a louder rattle and clink when it hits the floor.

 

    And then silence.

 

    Holding his breath, Suga waits and listens, ears straining. He has his eyes wide open even though he can’t see anything, not even his own hand in front of his face.

 

    A few seconds drip by, slowly, agonizingly. Silence pushes down on all sides until Suga feels like his lungs are going to burst with the effort of staying quiet.

 

    But no one comes.

 

    No door opens. No voices float to his ears through the sea of black.

 

    Suga exhales long and slow when he can’t stand it any longer, the sound shuddering through the air. His pulse is unnaturally fast at his wrists. A cold sweat has broken out over the curve of his spine, sliding down to the hollow at the base of his back.

 

_"How did I get here?"_ his brain cries. _"Where am I? Where’s Oikawa? Does Kumiko know I’m gone? Does Mom?"_

 

    Despair starts to seep under his skin. It starts to wrap around his bones and squeeze until Suga feels like they’ll break — fragile, glass bones. Hollow bones.

 

    Bones no one will ever find.

 

    Bones lost in the cold, deep, dark abyss of the ocean. Buried on the seafloor in a coffin of sand and yellow fabric and the dead, bloated bodies of fish with rotting scales and oily eyes and -

 

_"Stop it. Stop it now."_

 

    He bites down on his lower lip hard enough to draw blood. The new, fresh pain sends another aching crescendo through Suga’s skull followed by a roll of nausea through his stomach, but he holds his teeth in place, focusing. A warm, wet trickle of blood runs down his chin.

 

_"Now. Keep going."_

 

    His fingers move farther. Farther and farther and farther… until they bump into something more solid than the last object. Something that has a wide base as he feels up and then narrows — something with a circular, papery ring at the top and under that a set of what feel like metal extensions, a switch.

 

    A lamp.

 

    Suga flips it on with fingers that slip and tremble against the cool metal… and then the light that flares through the space is too bright for him to look at.

 

    A soft, surprised noise escapes his throat. He squeezes his eyes shut against the glare.

 

    Little bursts of color explode behind his eyelids. Little solar flares hidden in the dark.

 

    Slowly though, Suga blinks, little by little opening his eyes again. His palms are sweating. His throat is tight. He’s just barely holding onto his fear.

 

    An unfamiliar room swims into view.

 

    The first thing he notices are the books — entire walls are taken up by shelves reaching up to a ceiling higher than he had expected above his head… and they’re crammed full of books — stacks and stacks and stacks.

 

    The second thing Suga realizes is how big the room actually is.

 

    There’re more than four walls. 

 

_"One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine,"_ Suga counts, eyes widening. 

 

    And yet it’s surprisingly narrow, taller than it is wide. There are windows up there, Suga can see now, but dark curtains are drawn over them, blocking out any light. And when Suga looks closer, he realizes an iron staircase winds up from one corner, spiraling up to the top of the room, to a landing that winds around the higher shelves.

 

    Suga looks down next. He’s not sitting on a bed — it looks like two futons shoved together with a silky, green blanket thrown over them. And there’s a painkiller bottle — which is what he must’ve knocked over — on the floor, resting on a hardwood floor.

 

    A hardwood floor made of expensive-looking, polished mahogany.

 

    A floor Suga’s seen before.

 

    Suga swings his legs quickly off of the couches, his bare feet tangling in the blanket until he wrenches them free. His arms feel weak, rubbery, when he pushes himself up and the floor is ice-cold against his skin, but Suga stumbles forward a few steps, looking for a door.

 

    He needs to get out of here.

 

    The White Rabbit. That’s where he’s seen this floor before. In the twins’ living room with its creepy painting and odd staircase in the corner… a staircase that looks oddly similar to the one in here.

 

    Peering down at himself, Suga realizes he’s in the same clothes from the skating rink. Same pullover. Same jeans. His shoes are gone.

 

    Flashbacks of the chase flit and flap through his head.

 

    He had run. Of course he had run. Who wouldn’t with a near-stranger spouting shit like that at them?

 

_"But that’s not the only reason you had run."_ The voice in his head is flat, admonishing almost. _"Why won’t you just listen?"_

 

    Suga takes another few steps forward, shivering, ignoring the logic. So what? Why should he listen to Kuroo when none of it’s real?

 

    So what if he’s been haunted for weeks now? Haunted by nightmares, by seeing things that shouldn’t be there?

 

    This isn’t one of Oikawa’s paranormal documentaries. This is reality. And those things Suga’s been seeing? Those nightmares he’s been having?

 

    They can only mean one thing.

 

    That he’s just as crazy as Kuroo.

 

    And now he’s stuck here. Trapped in some unknown, unfamiliar room in a tattoo parlor. A room that Suga refuses to acknowledge couldn’t actually fit inside the building — not with the size of the space he had seen all those days ago.

 

    Besides, he doesn’t even know if he’s actually where he thinks he is. He could be anywhere in San Francisco. They could’ve shoved him away anywhere — hidden and locked away so no one will find him ever again.

 

_"Just find a way out,"_ he tells himself. _"Just find a way out of here."_

 

    He sees the door as soon as that last thought crosses his mind. It’s up the spiral of stairs, on the landing, plain and unassuming.

 

    And hopefully unlocked.

 

    Wincing at the consistent throb in his head, Suga heads for the staircase, avoiding kicking the painkiller bottle on the way. The iron is chilled under his fingertips when he steadies himself on the first step, vision swimming a little.

 

    But Suga grits his teeth and pulls himself up, going around and around, ignoring the shelves of books — some leather-bound, others gleaming with polished spines — his only focus on the black door at the top. And by the time he reaches it, he’s sweating and dizzy. He’s breathing too hard.

 

    The knock to his head must’ve been worse than he had first thought.

 

    Enough, apparently, that he has to sit down for a moment, squeezing his eyes shut to keep the room from tumbling over and over in his vision — books and couches and that hardwood floor all bleeding into each other. Nausea wells up in the pit of his stomach, bile sharp on his tongue.

 

    But it passes soon enough. Suga gets back to his feet.

 

    The doorknob turns. It’s just as cold in his palm as the stair railing but it’s turning and his heart is in his mouth as he twists it and pushes -

 

    The door swings open quietly. Light like the light from the lamp below him inches through the gap, illuminating the rug over the iron landing and then creeping over Suga’s legs, his stomach, his arms, face as he opens it wider.

 

    The outside is a hall. A narrow hall with a table to the side with a lamp on it. That’s where the light’s coming from.

 

    Suga looks out cautiously. He almost feels like a child sneaking off somewhere he shouldn’t go, but that feeling is quickly dwarfed by the fear he’s been keeping at bay until now along with relief that the door had been open.

 

    He doesn’t know where he is. This isn’t the living room he’d first walked in with Kuroo all of those nights ago, with his finger bleeding and Atsumu’s words whispering in his ear.

 

    It’s a plain hallway that curves to the right at the end and no other doors in sight. Only windows. Windows with more heavy, dark curtains drawn across them. And a tiled floor — black, nine-edged tiles that gleam in the lamp’s artificial glow.

 

    It all looks so… modern. The walls are stark white and the one rug that lies the length of the hall is an expensive-looking white fur one that Suga hopes is fake.

 

    It’s a silly thought to be having right now, he realizes. Hoping that the rug hasn’t been made from some poor, hunted animal when he’s the one currently in a kidnapping situation.

 

    Another crescendoing ache pounds against Suga’s skull and he shuts his eyes again, leaning against the doorframe for support. He has to be careful. He can’t afford to make a mistake and get lost. He doesn’t have the energy to run and he’s not sure how much longer he can stay upright like this.

 

    The injury to his head along with not having eaten anything since God knows when is a deadly combination and Suga is weak, probably both from blood loss and hunger.

 

    He steps out into the hall once the pain’s receded a bit. The rug is soft against his feet and it’s warmer out here, by a noticeable volume of degrees.

 

    Shuddering as a bit of the cold leaves him, Suga reaches out to that first black curtain over the window. 

 

_"There may be some recognizable landmarks outside,"_ he tells himself, glancing once more down the hall to make sure he’s still alone before pulling a corner of it back slowly. 

 

    As soon as Suga looks outside, his heart stops. The breath dies on his lips.

 

_"That’s - that’s not possible."_ Suga stands as still as a statue. Disbelief, confusion, terror… all of it swims through his aching skull. 

 

    But even when he blinks, even when he raises his other hand to rub at his eyes, the view remains the same. Unwavering and very much there.

 

    An entire city. An entire city sprawls out below him. Not San Francisco. Somewhere else. 

 

    Different buildings, taller buildings, blooming up from the horizon like flowers made of glass and steel and concrete. A city lit up in the night with a kaleidoscope of colors. 

 

    A city Suga doesn’t recognize.

 

    Stumbling back, Suga wraps his arms around himself and keeps moving, passing the desk with the lamp on it.

 

_"Not real. Not real. It’s not real. Your’e still in San Francisco. You’re still home. Just get out."_

 

    The hallway curves at the end and Suga edges up against the wall, peering around the side. His nerves are shot — staticky and sticky and nothing feels tangible anymore. He just needs to get out.

 

    Nothing is around the corner. Nothing but another hallway — just like the last but with doors now, on alternating sides all the way down. They’re all that dark, black wood. And there’s a single one at the end.

 

_"That has to be the way out,"_ Suga thinks but he doesn’t have any logic to back it up on. At the same time, he doesn’t really have a choice but to try it and then try the others if he keeps hitting a dead end.

 

    He needs to get out.

 

    "Fuck," he mutters, rubbing his arms. They’re still cold under his clothes. His tongue tastes like iron.

 

    This is crazy. All of this is absolutely nuts.

 

    Pausing, Suga feels in his pockets once more. It’s fruitless, not that he had expected it not to be. They — whoever "they" is — have taken his phone. He can’t call anyone. He can’t call the police.

 

    Suga digs his teeth into his lower lip without thinking and the cut from before slices deeper. He sucks in a breath at the pain. More blood flows down his chin. Suga looks down and watches as one drop falls, then another.

 

    They hit the rug beneath his feet silently. Crimson on white fur. Blood spilled, like an animal had been killed and skinned right here.

 

    Raising his cold, trembling fingers, Suga wipes at his mouth with the back of his hand. Blood smears sticky over his skin — it’s crusted over his chin too — but he ignores it and keeps walking. He has to keep moving.

 

    What feels like a lifetime later, he’s standing in front of the door at the end of the hall. 

 

    And, then, up close he can see that it has weird markings engraved all over it, carved deep into the wood. He can’t make out if it’s a language or just a pattern.

 

_"Does it really matter?"_ a little voice in the back of his head asks. The voice is scared, vulnerable, shaking.

 

    Not really, no. It doesn’t matter what those markings are. There’s only one thing that matters and it’s escaping.

 

    But Suga hesitates because he can feel something. It feels like there’s a thread floating somewhere inside his skull, wrapped around something. It feels like he needs to pull on it. He needs to grab it.

 

    He needs to see.

 

    He gets closer to the door, like a puppet being pulled on strings. He can’t control his legs anymore — all he can do is stare. His eyes wander over the markings… he raises a hand to trace one…

 

    Unbidden, a nightmare image comes back to him, slipping into his mind’s eye like water over sand.

 

_There’s an odd light filtering through the paper-thin curtains over his windows — it’s emerald, bright, clashes with the black hole that makes up Suga’s bedroom. It throws strange shadows over his walls, across the floor._

 

_Suga watches them, his brain filled with cobwebs — wisps of thought that escape his reaching fingers._

 

_He feels… lost. There’s an odd chill to his bones, a shard of ice that sits in his heart. A gray place in his chest that clashes with the electric glow coming through his windows._

 

_His bedroom is dark — shadows pool in every corner, cling to every edge. Suga sits up in a bed that has grown cold._

 

    Strange shadows. Strange symbols. Strange markings, like the ones on this door…

 

    Suga lets his fingers touch the wood.

 

    And the ice in his chest _flares_. 

 

    Deep, excruciating, a sucker punch to his lungs. _"Oh God."_

 

    Suga drops to the floor, on his knees, clutching at the spot and gasping. 

 

    "No. No. No, no, no."

 

    The voice that reaches his ears is his own he realizes a second too late, too caught up in the feeling in his chest. Too caught up in the cold rushing through his veins, the emptiness making up his entire body. The cold that makes the rest of him feel like he’s burning, like he has a fever. 

 

    His bones are dissolving. His blood is gone. He has no heart, no lungs, no muscles or skin or anything. Nothing.

 

    He’s turning into nothing, he’s - Oh God -

 

_"Make it stop. God, please make it stop."_

 

    And Suga can’t hold it in anymore. The terror. It’s too much. All of this is too much and he can’t breathe. He’s drowning and the sob that racks up his throat is too loud but he doesn’t care anymore. He can’t. He can’t, he can’t, he can’t -

 

    Strong hands cup Suga’s face.

 

    His eyes snap open and they find gray ones. Gray like the color of the ocean on a rainy day. Gray and deep and never-ending.

 

    Osamu kneels in front of him. The door with the markings is open behind him.

 

    "Breathe," he says and it’s a command.

 

    And as if he’s been programmed, wired, to do so, Suga’s sobs cease. He can only stare, wide-eyed, at the boy in front of him and do as he says. The breath rips in and out of his lungs until it slows, evens. 

 

    The cold recedes back to the space in his chest, curling in on itself. The room stops spinning.

 

    The nightmare fades.

 

    Suddenly Suga is tired. He’s so, so tired. His body slumps forward and Osamu catches him.

 

    But all he feels are arms around him and the softness of the rug beneath his fingers before there’s weightlessness. Floating, drifting, weightless and free. The ground disappears from beneath him.

 

    And then the light leaves too.

 

 

 

When Suga wakes the second time, he feels warmer.

 

    He’s lying down again. And when his eyes flicker open there’s another ceiling, but this one is a lot closer, not so high up.

 

    There’re noises too.

 

    Voices. And the clatter of what sounds like pots and pans. 

 

    Suga squeezes his eyes shut again. He swallows hard. He hadn’t gotten out. _"Fuck."_

 

    He had collapsed, he remembers that much. He must’ve been too weak — weaker than he had thought.

 

    He remembers a library. He remembers a white hall and white light. He remembers blood from biting his lip and how weak his legs had felt and then pain through his whole body — from the knock to his head.

 

    But the rest is hazy. Blurred and disjointed and no matter how hard he reaches for it, his fingers slip right through the smoky images in his head.

 

    Osamu.

 

    Osamu had been there. Which meant Suga had been right — he’s somewhere in The White Rabbit. He’s back with the twins. And Kuroo most likely.

 

    Something dark and sticky like dread fills the pit of Suga’s stomach but he pushes it down as best as he can. He can’t afford to jump to action irrationally this time. He has to wait. He has to plan and then make his move. He has to wait until he’s a bit stronger. Another half hour maybe. Or an hour. Just until he’s steady enough on his feet to run.

 

    Suga’s eyes open again. He works his fingers slowly, down by his sides, flexing them. Then his toes and his legs, arms. Nothing feels different…

 

    Except he feels better. He’s not so cold anymore. The taste of iron is gone. The dizziness too, when Suga cracks his eyes back open.

 

    He feels for his lower lip with his tongue. It’s still split open. It stings. 

 

    So that much had been real at least.

 

    He hadn’t imagined the room with all of the books. Or the odd, modern halls with their fur rugs and white walls.

 

    There had been something else… what had it been? Something else…

 

    "Finally awake, huh?"

 

    Suga’s entire body jerks, heart up in his mouth at the voice.

 

    Kuroo looms over him, dark and tall. 

 

    Suga’s shock melts as fast as it had come and then his body flushes white-hot with anger.

 

    "Where -," he growls, and then stops. His voice is raspy, hard to get out. He tries again, coughing a little. "Where the fuck am I? What did you do to me? Why -"

 

    "Koushi, wait, please," Kuroo starts, but Suga struggles to sitting, fists tangling in the new blanket thrown over him. He’s burning from the inside out. He’s… he’s _terrified_.

 

    "Don’t fucking call me that," he spits. "Don’t you dare call me that. Answer me. What the hell did you do to me? Why am I here? What do you _want_?"

 

    That last word comes out broken. It echoes off of the walls around them — walls Suga refuses to look at because he’s not going to back down from Kuroo’s dark gaze — and his voice blurs into a half-sob on it and he’s too afraid to hide the tremor in his voice, even over the anger.

 

    "Tetsu."

 

    Suga’s head whips around towards the new voice in the room — the room that he notices now is Atsumu and Osamu’s living room, the one he’s been in before — and then his heart skips a beat. His stomach drops like he’s just taken a plunge over the top of a rollercoaster.

 

    The sense of disbelief that fills him feels like deja vu.

 

    " _Alisa_?"

 

    Alisa — Kumiko’s girlfriend, the girl Suga’s seen countless times in his own home, the one he’s seen cry during movies and kiss his sister in the kitchen and make coffee at Parallels — stands in the doorway to the kitchen.

 

    And she’s wearing yellow. A knitted, yellow sweater.

 

    The person Suga had collided with on the street… it had been her.

 

    At Suga’s voice, Alisa flinches visibly. She looks at him with her large, green eyes and there’s something like pity written all over the downturned curve of her mouth.

 

    "Hey," she answers, tucking a strand of hair behind an ear. Then, to Kuroo, "Tetsu, I think it’s better if I - if I talk to him first."

 

    Suga is barely listening. He barely notices Kuroo leave the room, giving him one more long glance as he does so.

 

    Alisa. Alisa Haiba is standing here in The White Rabbit and she had been there on the street. She had been there at the exact same time Kuroo had been and somehow Suga is able to piece enough together within his spinning brain to realize that it couldn’t have been coincidence. 

 

    Or it could’ve been a really weird one. But Parallels, Alisa’s house, Suga’s house — none of Alisa’s usual spots are anywhere close to Church of 8 Wheels.

 

    In his head, Suga sees snapshots of times he’s seen Kuroo and Alisa together. All of those countless moments of the two of them — and of Kenma, of Lev — at Parallels, making coffee and talking to customers and walking through that…

 

    "Koushi."

 

    Suga stops thinking. He curls his knees up to his chest and stares at his sister’s girlfriend almost defiantly over his legs.

 

    "What’s going on?" The words, as they leave his mouth, are clear-cut. They’re like glass, razor-sharp. The brokenness to his voice is gone. 

 

    He _needs_ to know. He can’t keep running, not like this. Not after everything. But he needs to know now before he drives himself insane and loses everything because he thinks he’s seeing dead people, because he thinks he’s seeing shadows where there should be none, because his chest has felt empty ever since Osamu touched him and Kuroo had said as much and now Suga is back _here_ , the one place he had never wanted to come back to and his nightmares are haunting him even while he’s awake -

 

    "Koushi."

 

    Alisa’s soft voice cuts through the cacophony. She continues as soon as Suga meets her eyes. 

 

    "I know this all seems… I know a lot has happened but I promise I’m going to tell you everything. I just need you to focus on yourself first. Breathe. Please."

 

    She watches him with careful eyes, coming around the couch to sit on the frosted glass coffee table in front of him.

 

    Suga’s lower lip trembles. He’s so tired. 

 

    He wants to see Kumiko. He wants Oikawa to be here.

 

    He wants to go home.

 

    A few silent moments tick by. The noises from the kitchen have stopped. Suga knows they’re listening.

 

    But he listens to Alisa. He breathes. He focuses only on the inhale and the exhale of his lungs, so paper-thin.

 

    And then he turns his head to the left. He looks at that painting. He looks into the eyes of the angels and the demons and he holds tight to the last shred of something solid inside him. He holds onto it and he looks back at Alisa and he opens his mouth.

 

    "Tell me," he says. "Tell me everything."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> okay so I know this was kind of anti-climatic but I promise it'll pick up in the next few chapters ∠(･`_´･ )
> 
> as always, you can visit my blog for more OiSuga content [here](http://oisugasuga.tumblr.com/) ♥︎


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